Journal of Feline
Care Systems
A scholarly home for research and practice knowledge about the systems that determine whether cats can access, tolerate, benefit from, and remain connected to care.
- Editorial line
- Research on the systems that shape feline care
- Founding collection
- Making Feline Care Complexity Visible
- Publisher
- TANDEM Cat Institute
- Public expression
- Make care visible.
Making Feline Care Complexity Visible
The founding collection examines a shared problem from several directions: ordinary feline variability is often hidden when services retain only cats who fit narrow assumptions about health, behavior, restraint, and workflow.
Why the Journal of Feline Care Systems Exists
A field-building argument for studying eligibility, staffing, environments, documentation, continuity, and handling as determinants of feline care.
Grooming Needs of Cats in a High-Volume Feline Practice
A descriptive examination of age, medical alerts, handling cautions, care distribution, and the daily-living functions supported by grooming.
Is the “Special-Needs Cat” a Service-Design Artifact?
A selection-bias hypothesis: broad feline heterogeneity may appear exceptional mainly within systems designed around the unusually compliant cat.
Restraint Architecture in Feline Grooming
A framework for examining support distribution, compression, torque, startle exposure, staffing, and stopping capacity without requiring harmful live comparisons.
Evidence status: The founding manuscripts are in development. Each public article will identify its article class, data source, review pathway, conflicts, limitations, and version history. No draft is represented here as externally peer reviewed.
The system becomes the subject
Care is not only an encounter between a cat and a practitioner. The surrounding system determines who enters, what can be adapted, what is recorded, and who remains visible.
Access
Eligibility, refusal, referral, cost, location, and the assumptions used to define a “suitable” cat.
Adaptation
Staffing, environment, pace, medication context, handling, equipment, and stopping decisions.
Memory
Records, operational definitions, repeated observations, missingness, continuity, and organizational learning.
Outcome
Mobility, hygiene, daily living, comfort, affection, retention in care, welfare, and unanswered questions.
A home for care systems that cross traditional boundaries
JFCS connects clinical, operational, behavioral, welfare, and practice knowledge while keeping professional scope and evidence limits explicit.
Access and service design
Eligibility, exclusion, referral, retention, capacity, continuity, and the structures that determine who receives care.
Grooming and daily living
Coat care, hygiene, mobility, touch, affection, disability support, and the care needs hidden by a retail framing.
Handling and welfare
Physical support, restraint architecture, fear, sensory regulation, environments, stopping rules, and ethical validation.
Operational complexity
Staffing, workflow, medical flags, behavioral cautions, medication context, adaptations, and measures of care burden.
Records and learning systems
Registries, structured records, narrative, organizational memory, data governance, and feedback from care to practice.
Rescue and community systems
Shelter, foster, sanctuary, rescue, community-cat work, caregiving, collaboration, and implementation in constrained settings.
Knowledge can begin in practice.
You do not need academic credentials to contribute. You do need knowledge worth examining, respect for evidence, and willingness to develop the work with others.
Groomers, rescue and shelter workers, veterinary professionals, behavior and welfare specialists, technicians, caregivers, educators, data stewards, and guardians may all hold knowledge that deserves careful development and a durable scholarly record.
Academic language is not an admission requirement. Clear thinking, transparent sources, respect for cats and people, honest evidence boundaries, and willingness to revise are.
Read the public standardsI keep seeing a pattern
Begin with what repeats, where it occurs, what records exist, and what alternative explanations may matter.
We changed how care is organized
Describe the prior system, the change, why it was made, who it affected, and what outcomes were or were not measured.
We have records or a dataset
Start with provenance, dates, population, variables, missingness, repeated individuals, and privacy safeguards.
We developed a method or protocol
Explain the problem, operational steps, risks, training, current validation status, and how others could evaluate it.
The field should confront a question
Identify the assumption, the available evidence, the uncertainty, and the consequences for research or care.
Trust begins with visible rules
Before inviting submissions, the journal will make its decision authority, review pathways, welfare expectations, conflicts, data practices, corrections, versioning, and computational-assistance standards public.
Class and claim boundary
Every article identifies what kind of work it is, what materials support it, and which claims remain proposed or unvalidated.
Review status in plain view
External peer review, editorial review, practice review, and developmental work are named rather than flattened into a single label.
No harmful comparison required
The journal will not require authors to recreate a plausibly hazardous exposure merely to produce a comparator.
Conflicts and authority disclosed
Publisher, author, study-setting, ownership, intellectual-property, training, and close organizational relationships remain visible.
Data structure where records cannot travel
Definitions, denominators, missingness, codebooks, aggregate results, formulas, and analysis logic are shared when private records cannot be.
Corrections and versions endure
Stable article pages preserve citation details, review statements, disclosures, corrections, and a visible version history.
Contributor pathways
A clear route from experience to contribution.
JFCS welcomes careful work from practitioners, groomers, rescuers, educators, researchers, and others whose records or methods can make feline care more visible.
Already registered? Keep your biography, education, training, credentials, and professional links current in your contributor profile.