How to help, what money would actually buy, and who is owed credit for the work this is built on.
The best protocol nobody finds is worth nothing. If you know somebody who works at a shelter or a rescue, send them the link. If you are in a local lost-pet group, put it there. The people who need this have never heard of it and will not go looking until the worst night of their year.
The protocol prints as a handout on purpose, and it is CC BY 4.0 so you may copy, translate, alter and distribute it, including commercially. Pin it to a noticeboard. Leave a stack at a vet's desk. No permission needed and no credit required beyond attribution.
Open the printable protocolThis is the most valuable thing anyone can give this project. If you do this work, shelter or rescue staff, TNR trappers, animal control, trained searchers, or someone who found their own cat and learned something the hard way, and something here is wrong or missing, please say so. Field experience counts as evidence and you do not need a citation. This is the part where being wrong has a real cost.
Open an issueCosts nothing and helps more than it looks like it should. Stars are close to the only signal a project like this gets, and they decide whether anyone else ever finds it.
github.com/TechLuddite/kitty-come-homeSaid plainly, because it is true: your money does more good at your local shelter or rescue than it does here. They are the ones running the intake desk, holding the strays, lending out the humane traps and paying the vet bills. This project is a web page and a set of instructions, and it costs almost nothing to run.
If you came here intending to give something because a page like this helped you, give it to them. That is the more sensible option and there is no catch in saying so.
The Missing Animal Response Network is also worth your attention. Much of what is on the protocol page comes from their work, and they train the people who go out and find animals for a living.
One donation path, and an honest account of where the money actually goes.
Kept as its own section rather than folded into the donation copy, because it is credit rather than sponsorship.
Their 2018 study of 1,210 missing cats in Animals is the evidence base for almost every number on this site, and it is open access. Without it this would be one more page of confident advice with nothing behind it. The distinction between what their data supports and what it merely suggests is the reason the protocol can be honest about its own weak points.
doi.org/10.3390/ani8010005The behavioural model this whole protocol rests on, that a displaced indoor cat hides close by rather than roaming, and will often not answer when called, comes from their field practice, published freely for anyone to use. They have been saying it for two decades against the grain of standard lost-pet advice.
missinganimalresponse.comCredited here because the protocol sends people to them rather than competing with them. Petco Love Lost runs a free national lost-and-found database with photo matching, fed by roughly 3,000 shelters. Building a worse copy of it would have been the obvious move and the wrong one.
lost.petcolove.orgNobody named, because the list would be wrong. The humane traps get lent out by people doing this unpaid at 2am, and the protocol assumes throughout that they will help, because they reliably do.
This site has no dependencies. It is hand-written HTML, CSS and JavaScript with no framework, no build step and no package manager, so there is no dependency tree to credit and nothing that can rot underneath it. That is a deliberate choice for a page someone may need to load on bad signal in a dark garden.
Hosted on GitHub Pages, at no cost. The database groundwork for the planned search tool runs on Supabase's free tier.