How We Verify Listings
Our quality assurance process for maintaining the most accurate large animal vet directory.
1. Discovery
We identify large animal veterinary practices across the US using publicly available business directories, state veterinary licensing databases, and business listings. We filter out companion-only practices to ensure every listing serves large animals and livestock.
2. Cleaning & Deduplication
Raw records are deduplicated, standardized, and filtered. Permanently closed practices are excluded. Businesses that don't treat large animals are removed. Every edge case is individually reviewed before a decision is made.
3. Validation
Each business is reviewed to confirm it is a legitimate, active large animal veterinary practice accepting new clients. We use a YES/MAYBE/NO classification. MAYBE records are retained with lower confidence scores. NO records are excluded from the published directory.
4. Data Enrichment
We record the structured attributes we can confirm from a source: species treated and practice type (from the source records and federal accreditation categories), USDA accreditation, and Google ratings. Where a practice publishes it, or an owner submits it through a claim, we also add emergency availability and mobile or farm-call service. These service-level fields are present for only a subset of listings, and we never infer a service a practice has not stated.
5. Handling Uncertainty
When a data point cannot be confirmed from a source, we do not publish a guess. Unconfirmed fields display "Contact for details" rather than an assumed value, so an empty field always means "unknown", never "no". A gap in our data is always preferable to a fabricated fact.
6. Ongoing Maintenance
Data is refreshed on a rolling quarterly basis. High-traffic county pages are prioritized for re-verification. When practice owners claim their listing, updates are applied immediately. Users can report incorrect data via our contact form.
Our Zero-Fabrication Policy
We never invent data. If we can't find species information for a practice, we display "Contact for details." If we can't confirm emergency availability, we display "Contact for details." A gap in our data is always preferable to incorrect information.