Alfredo Ramses

The short version

I write everything on Cat Landlord. Not “oversee”, not “edit” — write. If a guide here has my name on it, I put the product in my apartment, watched what the cats did to it, and wrote down what happened.

What “independent” means

No publisher assigns these guides. No brand pays for one, sends a brief, or gets to see a draft. There is no PR list of products to feature this month and no deadline pushing a half-researched piece out of the door.

I have been writing and editing my own sites for years — home and outdoors before this one — which means the editorial standard here is one I set and one I have to live with. There is nobody above me to blame for a bad recommendation. That is the point of it, and it is also the uncomfortable part.

What research means here

“Researched” gets used loosely enough to mean nothing, so here is exactly what it means on this site. Every guide goes through all four of these before a word gets written:

1. The specs, model by modelDimensions, materials, weight, capacity, replacement parts — pulled from the manufacturer and checked against each other, not copied from a listing. Half the differences that matter are never mentioned in the marketing.
2. Reviews read at scale, for the complaint that repeatsOne bad review is an opinion. The same bad review two hundred times is a design flaw, and that is the thing worth writing down. This is where most of the useful information hides.
3. The claim checked against a source that isn’t sellingWhere a question has a real answer — how long a cat’s full stretch is, what actually neutralises ammonia, why a cat stops using a tray — it gets checked against veterinary and behavior sources, not against another blog.
4. Then it gets testedResearch tells you what to buy. The apartment tells you whether the research was right. Both go in the guide, and when they disagree the guide says so.

And where the evidence is genuinely thin, the guide says that too. A confident answer to a question nobody has actually settled is worse than no answer.

What I actually know, and what I don’t

I know what a litter box smells like in a small apartment in August. I know which scratching post survives a cat who treats furniture as a personal insult, and I know how many centimetres of stretch that takes, because I measured it.

I don’t know medicine. I’m not a veterinarian, a behaviorist or a nutritionist, and I don’t play one. When a question crosses that line — a cat that stops eating, blood anywhere, a litter habit that changes overnight — the answer on this site is always the same: that is a vet visit, today.

How I work

• Nothing is recommended before six months of real use
• Every recommendation carries its own flaw, in writing
• No brand has ever paid for a place on this site, and none will
• If I get something wrong and you tell me, I fix the article and say what changed

The cats

• 
  Otisa very large ginger Maine Coon who decides within about ten minutes whether a new scratching post is furniture or firewood. He has been wrong once.
• 
  Hazela British Shorthair with eleven pounds of strong opinion about litter texture. Half the odor testing on this site exists because of her.

Get in touch

I read every message and answer most of them myself. Corrections are especially welcome — an error that stays up is worse than one that gets fixed in public.