A bit of a dry update this time.
With the site starting to gain some real traction we thought it appropriate to actually compose some legal terms, and to ensure we are complying (to the best of our ability) with the various global data protection and privacy legislations.
News
We’ve added new legal terms
We’ve now added a Privacy Policy, Cookie Policy, Terms of Use, and Disclaimer.
When reading these documents, they may seem a bit overwhelming, but rest assured they contain mostly standard boilerplate legal terms. Take your time to read through them.
Where specific terms may infringe on your legal rights, your rights are upheld and, the infringing term is void. We cannot enforce legal terms that restrict your rights.
I would also like to highlight the disclaimer, notably the Professional Disclaimer section.
At the time of writing this reads:
The Site cannot and does not contain animal care and nutrition advice. The animal care and nutrition information is provided for general informational and educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional advice. Accordingly, before taking any actions based upon such information, we encourage you to consult with the appropriate professionals.
In the UK, we have the SAAMCO principle from South Australia Asset Management Corp. v York Montague Ltd [1997] and BPE v Hughes Holland and others [2017].
In short, the SAAMCO principle draws a distinction between ‘advice’ given by a professional and ‘information’:
- Information is provided for the purpose of enabling someone else to decide on a course of action
- Advice is a duty to advise somebody on what course of action should be taken.
Basically, it’s a limitation of liability thing; professionals providing information are only liable for caused by that information being wrong, but professionals providing advice are liable for all of the losses following the advice.
Recently the Supreme Court ruled in Manchester Building Society v Grant Thornton UK LLP [2021]:
The distinction in SAAMCO “is too rigid and, as such, it is liable to mislead”.
The long and the short of this ruling is that the counterfactual test in SAAMCO only applies to ‘information’ cases (not ‘advice’ cases). The test determines the scope of duty by asking whether the claimant’s actions would have resulted in the same loss if the advice given by the defendant had been correct. In ‘advice’ cases, the test is what position the claimant would be in had he not entered into the transaction at all. In both cases, the losses must be foreseeable.
This is one reason we only provide animal care and nutrition information.
But we don’t say this only to limit liability, we also believe that you should consult with a qualified professional, such as a registered nutritionist, behaviourist, or veterinarian before acting on any information, especially when that information is from the internet.
The articles and posts we write cannot consider your animal’s specific needs and situation. We cannot account for the medical, behavioural, and environmental differences of all the animals of all our readers. While we make every effort to provide accurate and helpful information we also cannot guarantee that we won’t make mistakes or misinterpret research materials, hence the Website Disclaimer section in the disclaimer. This is to say, please do not make decisions about the care of your animal based solely on one source. Gather all the information you can and, where possible, consult a professional.
The last thing any of us animal lovers want is to make a mistake that harms another creature.
SAAMCO sources:
https://lawprof.co/tort/remoteness-cases/saamco-v-york-montague-1996-3-all-er-365/
New features
Cookie banner
We’ve added a cookie consent banner and implemented blocking with explicit consent. This means no cookies are saved to your device until you click ‘accept’ to accept our cookie policy.
Of course, you can also decline and no cookies will be saved.
You can change your preferences anytime by clicking the Consent Preferences link in the footer of any page.
We’ve also removed the informed consent ‘cover’ on the embedded YouTube videos as this is now covered by the cookie banner.
New font
We now use the Atkinson Hyperlegible Next™ Font which was developed and created by the Braille Institute of America.
Previously, we used Noto Sans but weren’t married to it; we just chose it because it’s a basic neutral font.
After discovering Atkinson Hyperlegible Next™ Font I personally loved it from an aesthetic point of view, and the fact that it’s designed from the ground up to be easily legible for readers with low vision. We try our best to make this site as accessible as we can.