Kennel Software vs. Cattery Software: 10 Tells That a Platform Was Built for Dogs

Most “pet boarding software” is kennel software with the word “pet” in the marketing. That's not an insult — it's a history: these products grew up around dogs, and cats arrived later as a checkbox. If you run a cattery, here are ten tells that reveal what a platform was actually built for — and what the cat-literate version of each looks like.

The ten tells

1. Kennel cough on a cat's form. The instant giveaway. Cats need the cat flu (FVRCP) vaccination tracked; a platform built for cats never shows a cat owner a dog vaccine.
2. “Extra walks” offered for a cat. If the add-on catalogue doesn't know cats don't go for walkies, the species support is a label, not logic.
3. Any two cats can share a pen. No household concept, no consent capture — just a capacity shortcut. Built for cats means one-cat-per-unit by default, sharing only within a family, with documented consent.
4. No kitten age screening. The four-month rule is cattery basics; software that can't ask it makes you enforce it at the front desk.
5. FeLV/FIV doesn't exist. A cat-literate intake can ask about it and route a “yes” to a conversation instead of a rejection.
6. Capacity is a headcount. Cat capacity is units and household groups, not number of animals in the building.
7. Multi-cat families pay full price unless cats share. Wiring the family discount to shared floor space penalises correct cat housing.
8. Every screen says “kennel.” Terminology is small until your customers see their cattery called a kennel on their own booking page.
9. The example pet is always a dog. Placeholder names, empty-state illustrations, onboarding copy — if every default assumes a dog, so did the roadmap.
10. One intake form for every animal. Cats need different questions — stress baseline, litter habits, hiding preferences — not a dog form with “species” at the top.

Why the tells matter

None of these is individually fatal. Together they compound into a daily tax: you re-explain your policies to your own software, work around fields that don't apply, and present customers with forms that quietly say “dogs first.” Cat owners — a famously detail-attentive audience — read those signals on your booking page and draw conclusions about your facility, fairly or not.

Where we stand

We built The Kennel Manager to pass all ten — species-scoped vaccinations and questions, household-only sharing with consent, unit-based capacity with flexible spaces, family pricing that doesn't punish separate housing, and a product that greets a cattery with cats: cat illustrations, cat examples, cat services, cat terminology. Yes, it's called The Kennel Manager — we're aware of the irony, and we decided the name matters less than the logic. Run the ten-tell test on us or on anyone. Your software should know what a cat is.