---
name: Mara Ellison
role: Editorial Director
site: MyLuvDog
focus: Editorial standards, claim verification, health-content risk review, plain-English explainers, correction policy, affiliate honesty
---

Mara Ellison

Editorial Director, MyLuvDog

I've spent a dozen years in publishing and editorial, and I've owned the standards desk here since MyLuvDog was small enough to fit in a single spreadsheet. My job isn't to be the loudest voice on the site. It's the opposite. I'm the person who reads a guide after the writer is proud of it and asks the unglamorous questions: How do we know that? Who says so? What happens to a reader who takes this literally? I've volunteered at a local shelter since 2015, and that keeps me honest in a way no style guide can — you meet a lot of dogs whose people were told something confident and wrong.

What follows isn't a résumé. It's how we actually work, because that's the part that should earn your trust.

The standard every guide is held to

Every page on this site has to survive one plain test before it publishes: could a careful, slightly skeptical reader trace each meaningful claim back to something real? Not a vibe, not "experts say," but a source you could go and check yourself.

In practice that means we separate three things that get blurred everywhere else on the internet. There's fact — a claim about the world that's either true or false, and therefore has to be sourced. There's judgment — our read on a product or a trade-off, which we're allowed to have as long as we label it as ours. And there's preference — the stuff that's genuinely down to you and your dog. Writers here get real freedom in the second and third buckets. The first bucket is where I'm strict, because that's the one where a reader can get hurt.

A guide that mixes a strong opinion into a health claim and serves them as one confident sentence doesn't pass. We pull them apart, source the factual half, and mark the rest as opinion. It reads a little less slick. It's also a lot harder to be wrong in a way that matters.

Our source hierarchy

Not all sources are equal, and pretending they are is how bad advice spreads. We keep an explicit pecking order, and writers know it before they start.

At the top: established veterinary and animal-health bodies, peer-reviewed veterinary literature, and official regulatory or safety guidance. Below that: reputable veterinary hospitals and universities publishing clinical, reviewed material. Below that: well-run journalism that itself cites primary sources. Near the bottom: brand marketing, single blog posts, and forum anecdotes — useful for understanding what owners are worried about, almost never good enough to support a health claim on their own.

The rule I repeat most often is simple: a veterinary body outranks a blog, and it outranks us. If a manufacturer's page and a veterinary association disagree, the association wins and the disagreement gets mentioned rather than hidden. When the good sources genuinely conflict — and on real questions they sometimes do — we say so in the text instead of picking the tidier answer. "The evidence here is mixed" is a legitimate finding. It's often the most honest sentence on the page.

We also date our knowledge. Guidance changes. A claim that was current a few years ago can quietly become outdated, so we note when something reflects a particular moment's understanding rather than a settled law of nature.

Writing about health without scaremongering

Dog health is what people in this trade call YMYL — "your money or your life" content, the category where getting it wrong does real damage. We treat it that way, and the biggest thing that means in practice is that we refuse to frighten people into clicks.

Fear is the cheapest engagement tool there is. Tell someone their dog might be secretly dying and they'll read to the end. I won't run that. Alarmist framing does two harmful things at once: it pushes anxious owners toward rash decisions, and it drowns out the genuinely urgent signals in a wash of manufactured panic. If everything is an emergency, nothing is.

So our health content follows a few firm habits. We describe symptoms plainly, without loading every line with dread. We're clear about uncertainty instead of papering over it with false confidence. And on anything that touches diagnosis or treatment, we say the true and slightly boring thing: talk to your vet, who can actually examine your dog. We are an editorial site, not a clinic, and we don't have veterinary credentials — writing as if we did would be its own kind of dishonesty. Our job is to help you understand and ask better questions, not to stand in for the person who can put hands on your animal.

Plain English is part of the safety, not a downgrade from it. If a reader can't understand the advice, the advice hasn't been given.

Why we never pretend we lab-tested

When you read a product roundup here, you're reading editorial research — careful comparison of specs, materials, documented safety issues, manufacturer claims held up against independent sources, and the patterns in how real owners report a product performing over time. What you are not reading is a fabricated account of us running ten harnesses through a testing rig we don't have.

I feel strongly about this because the fake-testing voice is everywhere and it's corrosive. "We spent 40 hours testing" is a sentence a lot of sites type without a stopwatch anywhere in the building. Once a reader catches one invented test, everything else you've written is suspect too — and they should be suspicious.

So we write about products the way we actually assessed them. If a ranking rests on published specifications and safety records, we say so. If it rests on the weight of owner reports, we say that, and we're honest that owner reports are messy evidence. Where hands-on trial genuinely happened, we describe exactly what was done and don't inflate it. The promise is that our language matches our method — no more, no less. A roundup that's honest about being research-based is worth more than one that's dramatic about testing that never occurred.

Affiliate links, disclosed and firewalled

We earn commission on some of the products we link to. You should know that plainly, up front, in words rather than buried legalese — and we disclose it on every page where it applies.

Here's the part that matters more than the disclosure itself: the money doesn't touch the rankings. The order of a list is set before anyone looks at what pays and what doesn't. A product doesn't climb because its commission is higher, and it doesn't get quietly dropped because it pays nothing — plenty of things we recommend earn us zero, and some of them are the best pick precisely because they're cheap or widely available. The commercial side and the editorial side are kept on opposite sides of a wall, and I'm the one who guards it. If a recommendation ever looked like it was bought, the whole site's credibility would be, too. That's not a trade I'll make.

How corrections work

We get things wrong sometimes. Everyone who publishes at any volume does. What separates trustworthy from not is what happens next.

When we find an error — or when a reader points one out, which happens and is welcome — we fix it promptly and we don't do it in the dark. A substantive correction is marked as a correction, not silently swapped so the page pretends it was always right. Readers deserve to know the record changed and roughly what changed. Guidance evolves, too, so we revisit older health and product content on a rolling basis and update it against current sources rather than letting it quietly rot. An outdated page that looks current is a small lie by omission, and I treat it as one.

A correction policy you never use is decoration. Ours gets used, and I'd rather it did.

What twelve years of editing taught me

The lesson that's stuck hardest is that trust is built in the unglamorous places — the sourced claim, the labelled opinion, the correction nobody made you publish, the ranking you didn't sell. Readers can feel the difference even when they can't name it. A page that respects them reads differently from one that's trying to win them.

The other lesson is humility. The most dangerous sentence in this whole field is a confident one that isn't backed by anything. I'd rather we say "here's what we know, here's what we don't, and here's when to ask your vet" than perform a certainty we haven't earned. Your dog is counting on you to make good calls. The least we can do is give you clean information to make them with.