📡 LIST
Dedicated to delivering seniors to warm, loving forever homes.
📖 About
In 2024, 607,000 animals were euthanized at shelters in the United States. That averages out to roughly 1,660 dogs and cats per day.
Here's Henry.
When we adopted him from Austin Pets Alive!, they approximated his age to be 7 years old. It was a believable age. An Embark test a few months later revealed he was closer to 10 years old and his heartworm was more progressed than we knew, in part due to a genetic condition that had been previously unknown.
We adopted him thinking we had at most 3 years with him. In the end, we only had 10 months together. It made us realize how close he had been to passing without the loving home he deserved.
1 in 5 don't make it out
In 2024, the national save rate for dogs and cats was 82% — meaning nearly 1 in 5 animals entering a shelter or rescue did not make it out alive. Of the 5.8 million who entered, 748,000 had non-live outcomes — including 607,000 who were euthanized.
Seniors bear the worst of it. Dogs over 9 years old are half as likely to leave a shelter alive compared to puppies, with only about 25% of senior dogs ever getting adopted. They spend up to 4× longer in shelters and are euthanized at 2.5× the rate of the general dog population. When space runs out, they're usually first on the list.
After Henry passed, we started paying more attention to the quiet seniors with cloudy eyes and gray muzzles who sit quietly besides their owners at outdoor cafes while everyone walks past. We knew from experience that they don't require much, mostly a warm bed, healthy meals, and a stable source of love.
Henry was our proof that the best years are yet to come. Sniff at sniffhome.org was built in his honor, and Golden Years Club is a continuation of this work honoring our beloved family members.
Technology for Good
Golden Years Club is more than a website. It uses a novel combination of computer vision, veterinary-grade health schemas, and multi-source data aggregation to surface the animals that need help the most. Every listing photo is assessed blind which eliminates anchoring bias and provides an independent clinical signal from images alone.
Animal records are deduplicated across adoption platforms using perceptual hashing and reconciled into a single identity per animal. Health assessments are captured longitudinally, making it possible to detect changes in condition over time rather than relying on a single point-in-time observation.
Stack:
- ▸ Next.js · React · TypeScript
- ▸ Gemini 2.5 (structured output)
- ▸ PostgreSQL · Prisma
- ▸ Sharp (perceptual hashing)
- ▸ Railway · GitHub Actions
Golden Years Club is part of the same family of work as Sniff. The Sniff API taps into Golden Years Club's database to help owners search for their lost pet. Both projects are open source.
Visit them here: