One animal.
One record.
A sighting on its own is an anecdote. The network is what turns scattered observations into a single animal with a history — one that survives the rescue, the handover, and the change of organisation.
From a photo to a permanent identity.
Someone reports an animal — a photo, a place, a condition. That is the whole barrier to entry, and it is deliberately that low.
Repeat sightings in the same area, matching appearance, get proposed as the same animal. Confirmation is a human decision, not an automatic merge.
Once chipped, the animal carries a 15-digit ISO code. Every entry after that attaches to the code, so the history holds across clinics and organisations.
Sterilisation, vaccination, treatment and release all post back to the same record, with who did it and when. That is what makes coverage countable.
A record that only one org can read is not a record.
Street animals do not respect organisational boundaries. The dog one group sterilises is the dog another group treats for mange and a third feeds every evening. If each keeps its own notebook, the animal has three partial histories and nobody has the whole one.
StrayPaw is the shared layer, not a replacement for any of them. Organisations keep their own workflow, their own cases and their own data; what they gain is that the animal stays identifiable when it moves between them.
Everything an intervention needs to be judged.
A closed record answers four questions, and it is not closed until it answers all four: where it happened, how many animals were actually treated rather than targeted, who paid, and who verified it. That is the difference between a report and evidence.
Where the work happened, at ward resolution rather than city totals.
Animals treated, not animals planned for.
The amount, and the funder behind it.
Who checked the outcome, and when.