tldr; I have released petfinder-api, a Python client toPetfinder.com‘s web API. Important links: Documentation, source. petfinder-api is under the BSD License.

After months of waiting for things to settle down, Erin and I decided to spend the time to pick out our long-awaited second dog. Given that we wanted to rescue a dog, the obvious place to go is Petfinder.

We set out to find the perfect dog for Erin and I, and filtered down to what we were looking for. That only left… 36 pages to sort through. Petfinder’s filtering capabilities are very limited, the result display lists are somewhat hard to look through, and the whole thing is just pretty clunky.

Out of frustration (we had been half heartedly looking for months), my mind had often entertained the thought of trying to do better. Petfinder generously built in an API to get at their data, and it looked pretty simple. The problem was, I couldn’t find a packaged, maintained Petfinder API for Python. So it became my weekend project. This would be the first step towards making something more useful than Petfinder (getting on near equal footing as far as data goes).

I may or may not ever actually develop a Petfinder+, but I consider making it easier for developers to use their data a good cause, and am proud to announce the release of petfinder-api. It is a very thin wrapper around their web API, and includes documentation.

I’d love to hear any feedback, and hope this is useful to someone!