Free tool — for anyone deciding which dog or cat to adopt
Pet-Adoption Fit Scorecard for Dogs & Cats
This free pet-adoption fit scorer compares two dogs or cats across five weighted criteria and shows which one fits the household you actually have. A photo on a shelter's website is very good at drowning out everything else about an animal; this turns the decision into something you can see. The five criteria are the ones that commonly matter here — energy, hours alone on a weekday, space and housing, shedding and allergies, and fit with the children at home. Each carries a fixed weight, you rate each animal 1 to 5, and it returns one weighted score apiece. Use it here in your browser, take the starter spreadsheet away to fill in on your own candidates, or print the PDF and read the method at the shelter.
Score two dogs or cats on five weighted criteria
Pre-filled with a fictional worked example — Biscuit, a calm adult shelter mutt, and Nova, an unmet Siberian Husky puppy. Type your own candidates over them.
| Criterion | Weightof 100 | Biscuit (shelter mutt) | Nova (husky puppy) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Energy & Exercise MatchThe exercise this dog or cat needs vs. what you'll actually give it | 26 | ||
| Hours Alone on a WeekdayHow long the animal can comfortably stay home while you're at work | 21 | ||
| Space & Housing FitWhether your home, and any weight or breed caps, can fit it | 21 | ||
| Shedding & Allergy FitHow much the coat sheds against what the household can live with | 16 | ||
| Fit With the Children in the HomeHow this dog or cat is likely to do around the kids already there | 16 |
Weights total 100 and are read-only here — you rate the animals, not the weights. The free spreadsheet below lets you type your own over them; only the paid workbook computes them from your household.
Each score is every rating multiplied by its weight, added up, then divided by 100.
Margin: 2.10 points. That's a clear call under this scoring.
This free scorer doesn't compute your weights from your household, price the animal, count your weekly hours, or score an individual animal from what you saw at a visit — those are what the paid workbook adds.
This is a decision aid, not veterinary or behavioral advice. Biscuit and Nova are fictional examples.
Take it with you — free, no signup
Direct download. No email, no account — just the files.
What it does
- Scores two dogs or cats at once across five weighted criteria — energy, hours alone on a weekday, space and housing, shedding and allergies, and fit with the children at home.
- Uses five fixed weights (26, 21, 21, 16 and 16, totaling 100) rather than computing them from your household — the browser scorer shows them read-only, and the downloadable spreadsheet lets you type your own over them.
- Returns one weighted score per animal on a clean 1–5 scale, and in both the browser and the spreadsheet declines to name a winner when the two land within 0.1 of each other.
- Comes pre-loaded with a fictional worked example where the animal everyone falls for is not the one that wins: Biscuit, a calm adult shelter mutt, scores 3.84 against 1.74 for Nova, an unmet Siberian Husky puppy.
- Runs entirely in your browser — nothing you type is sent anywhere, and nothing is saved.
Related reading
Own it, don't rent it
Weighing more than two animals?
This free scorer weighs two animals across five criteria you are given. The full Pet-Adoption & Breed-Fit Decision Helper takes six candidates across twelve criteria whose weights it computes from twenty-six questions about your own household, prices each animal over its whole life and scores whether you can afford it, counts the hours a week it needs against the hours you have, flags hard limits in plain words without ever filtering a candidate out of the ranking, and re-runs the ranking six ways to tell you whether the answer is stable. It also scores the individual animal in front of you: mark a candidate as an individual animal, log a shelter visit, and eight of your nine observations re-score six of that candidate's rated traits from what you actually saw. A 12-tab workbook you keep (Excel, Google Sheets or LibreOffice), a 72-row breed and type reference, and three guides including a printable shelter visit kit.
A one-time purchase you keep and re-run for the next animal — the structured workbook between a blank spreadsheet and a breed quiz that hands you a list of breed pages.
A decision aid, not veterinary, behavioral, financial or legal advice, and no substitute for your vet, a qualified behaviorist, or the shelter's own assessment of an animal. A weighted score is a tool for thinking, not a verdict. The two example animals, Biscuit and Nova, are fictional, and every number attached to them is invented for illustration. No dog or cat is reliably allergen-free, whatever a breed is marketed as; treat a severe allergy as a question for a doctor. Once you have filled it in, the scorecard holds your own household's ratings — clear them before you pass a copy on. Free to use; please don't resell or redistribute.