In this guide
Every breeding match runs through an age filter before it is ever scored. A dog is considered between 18 and 96 months, a cat between 12 and 84, a rabbit between 6 and 48. A breed can override either bound, and a Great Dane and a Chihuahua do not mature on the same clock.
Strict is the safer direction to be wrong in
The two ways to get a window wrong are not equal. Too narrow and a valid match is hidden, which is an inconvenience you can work around by asking. Too wide and the engine returns an animal that cannot safely breed, which is not an inconvenience at all. So where the evidence is thin, our numbers err on the narrow side.
The lower bound is the later of sexual and skeletal maturity, not first heat. An animal that can conceive is not the same as an animal that should.
They are data, not code
The windows live in seeded rows, not in a constant somewhere in the engine. That matters for one reason: revising them is a re-seed rather than a release, so a veterinary correction does not have to wait for an engineering cycle.
We say this plainly because the current numbers are engineering estimates. A veterinary pass over them is a gate before launch, not a nice-to-have afterwards, and when it lands the numbers will change without a line of scoring code moving.
What the filter does not do
It never guesses. An animal whose age is not recorded does not quietly pass - it fails the filter, the same as one outside the window. Nor does the window decide the score on its own: being inside it is worth 10 of the 100 points and appears as its own reason next to the number.
