Effective: May 2026 · Last updated: September 2026
These Terms of Use ("Terms") govern your access to and use of grumpycapy.com (the "Site") and any related content or services we offer (together, the "Services"). The Services are operated by Data Sauna LLC, a Wyoming (USA) limited liability company ("Grumpy Capy", "we", "our", "us"), whose registered office is 30 N Gould St, Ste R, Sheridan, WY 82801, USA. By using the Services, you agree to these Terms. If you don't agree, please don't use the Services.
1. Eligibility
The Services are not directed to children. They're intended for a general audience, and by using the Services you confirm you are able to form a binding agreement under the laws of your jurisdiction. If you are under 13, please don't use the Services.
You must be at least 13 to send us a sighting, and if you are under 18 you need a parent or guardian's permission to do it. Submitting a photograph grants us a licence to publish it, and that is not something a child can agree to alone. If we learn a submission came from someone under 13, we delete it and everything attached to it. The Privacy Policy covers how we handle information from children generally.
Do not send photographs in which a child is identifiable unless you are their parent or guardian, or you have that person's permission. Tell us if one reaches us and we will take it down.
2. The Services
Grumpy Capy publishes capybara guides and explainers, a directory of venues that keep capybaras, quizzes, curated product picks, and a reader-submitted wall of capybara sightings that visitors can vote on. The Services are free to read and are funded by display advertising and affiliate commissions. They are provided for personal, editorial, and entertainment reference, and are not a substitute for professional legal, medical, veterinary, financial, or other expert advice.
3. Content and intellectual property
All original content on the Site — editorial text, original copy, layout, code, and material we publish — is owned by us or our licensors and is protected by copyright and other intellectual-property laws. Photos and clips on the Spotted wall remain the property of the readers who took them and are published here under the licence in section 5. The "Grumpy Capy" name and brand elements are our property.
You may view and read the content, share links to individual pages, quote a short passage for non-commercial commentary or review with attribution and a link back, and save pages for personal offline reading. Individual memes may be reshared with credit. The following require our prior written permission: wholesale republishing of content; scraping, crawling, or bulk downloading for redistribution or to train a third party's AI model; using our name, logo, or visual identity in a way that suggests endorsement or affiliation; and commercial use of any kind. For permissions or licensing, use the contact page.
4. Imagery and AI-generated content
Most images on Grumpy Capy are real photographs licensed from photographers on Unsplash, Pexels, Pixabay, and Wikimedia Commons, with credit shown under each image where applicable.
Some images on this site are AI-generated, specifically using ChatGPT, and are used as editorial illustrations. Where AI-generated imagery appears, it is credited to Grumpy Capy as the author and is not presented as a photograph of a real event, real animal, or real location. We use AI illustrations only for editorial, commentary, and decorative purposes — never to fabricate events, depict real people, or misrepresent factual claims about specific places or animals.
5. Sightings you send us
The Spotted wall is made of photos and short clips sent in by readers, ranked by visitor votes. This section governs anything you send us through that form. It applies in addition to the rest of these Terms.
What you are promising when you submit
By submitting a photo or clip you confirm, for each submission, that: you personally took it, or you hold all rights needed to license it to us; it shows a real capybara and has not been generated or materially altered by AI; it is not taken from someone else's post, a stock library, a news outlet, or any other source you do not control; no identifiable person appears in it without their consent, and no identifiable child appears in it without a parent or guardian's consent; and publishing it will not infringe anyone's copyright, trademark, privacy, publicity, or other rights. If you are under 18, do not submit without a parent or guardian's permission; if you are under 13, do not submit at all.
The licence you give us
You keep the copyright. Submitting does not transfer ownership of anything. You grant Data Sauna LLC a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, sublicensable licence to host, store, reproduce, re-encode, resize, crop, and display the submission on the Site, and to reproduce it in our own promotion of the Site (for example a post on our social accounts linking back to the wall), for as long as it remains published, together with the caption and credit that appear with it. Sublicensable covers our hosting and delivery providers only — it is not permission for anyone else to republish your work. We do not sell your submission, license it to third parties for their own use, or use it to train an AI model, and we do not allow others to scrape the wall for that purpose (see section 4).
This licence ends when the submission comes down. Ask us through the contact page and we will remove it; allow a reasonable period for caches and copies already made by third parties, which we do not control.
Credit and links
You choose the credit: a name, a handle, or a link to a social profile. A link is rendered as a clickable credit only where it points to a platform on our allowlist; anything else is displayed as plain text. All user-supplied links carry rel="nofollow ugc", so submitting one confers no search-ranking benefit, and submissions made to obtain a backlink will be rejected. We may normalize, shorten, or correct the display form of a credit, and we may decline to publish a credit that is misleading, impersonates someone, or is itself promotional.
Review, editing, and removal
Every submission is reviewed by a person before it appears, and we are under no obligation to publish anything. We may reject a submission without giving a reason, edit a caption for length, clarity, spelling, or house style, and remove any published sighting at any time. Publication is not an endorsement of the submitter, and the ranking on the wall is an editorial feature driven by visitor votes, not a competition, prize draw, or promise of exposure. No payment, royalty, or other consideration is due to you for a submission, whether or not it is published and however it ranks.
What will not be published
Submissions are rejected if they are AI-generated or materially manipulated; are somebody else's work, including screenshots of another person's post; show animals other than capybaras, or a capybara only incidentally in a photograph of a person; show an animal being harmed, harassed, baited, or handled unsafely; identify a private residence or contain anything that could put an animal or a person at risk; contain nudity, sexual content, violence, hate speech, or harassment; contain advertising, watermarks, promotional overlays, or contact details; or are submitted in bulk, automatically, or with the intention of gaming the ranking.
Voting
Voting is open to every visitor without an account, limited to a fixed number of votes per person per day and one vote per sighting, and is administered using a random identifier stored on your device (see the Cookie Policy) together with rate-limiting signals. You agree not to use scripts, automation, multiple browsers, private windows, VPNs, incentives, or coordinated campaigns to cast votes you would not otherwise be entitled to. We may discard votes we believe to be automated or manipulated, adjust or reset a sighting's score, and block access, without notice. Scores and positions are provisional, may be recalculated, and carry no promise of accuracy or permanence.
Unlawful content, and what we keep
If a sighting is reported to us as unlawful — not merely unwelcome, but material whose publication or possession would itself break the law — we take it off the site and we keep a copy rather than deleting it. This is deliberate, and it is the one case where our normal deletion schedule does not apply. Destroying material that is the subject of a report can destroy the only record that it existed, which helps nobody, least of all a person harmed by it.
Where the law requires us to report such material to an authority, or to a body designated to receive those reports, we will do so, and we will preserve what we hold for as long as that requires. We may share it with law enforcement or with such a body. We will not share it with anyone else, and we do not use it for any other purpose.
This is an exception to the retention described in the Privacy Policy, which otherwise deletes submitted files within seven days. Where the two disagree, this paragraph governs, and only for material in this narrow category.
Copyright complaints
If you believe something on the wall infringes your copyright, tell us through the contact page. Include the URL of the page it appears on, enough detail to identify the work you say it copies, a statement that you have a good-faith belief the use is not authorized by you, the rights holder, or the law, a statement that the information in your notice is accurate and that you are the rights holder or authorized to act for them, and your name and contact details.
We handle complaints ourselves rather than through a designated agent. In practice that means we take the material down first and discuss it afterwards: nothing on this wall is worth a dispute, and putting something back costs us one deployment. We aim to remove within a few days of reading a complaint, and we end access for anyone who submits infringing material more than once.
If your sighting was removed and you believe that was a mistake, reply and say so. We will look again. There is no formal process you have to follow to ask, and we would rather be told than leave a correct submission down.
6. Acceptable use
You agree not to: use the Services for any unlawful purpose or in violation of these Terms; probe, scan, or test the vulnerability of the Site or breach any security measures; interfere with or disrupt the Services or connected networks (including automated requests, denial-of-service attempts, or flooding the contact form); use bots, scrapers, or other automated means to collect content without our written permission; submit false, misleading, or impersonating information to the contact form or the sightings form; submit content you do not have the rights to, or manipulate the voting on the sightings wall (see section 5); or generate artificial or fraudulent clicks or impressions on ads shown on the Site (see section 8).
7. Affiliate links
Some Amazon and Etsy links on this site are affiliate links. If you click through and buy something, Grumpy Capy may earn a commission at no additional cost to you. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
Affiliate relationships do not control editorial decisions. We aim to describe products accurately, avoid misleading endorsements, and avoid unsupported product claims.
8. External links and third-party marketplaces
Product links, Etsy listings, and Amazon picks point to third-party marketplace sites. Grumpy Capy is not the seller of those marketplace products and is not responsible for third-party content, policies, availability, pricing, shipping, returns, warranties, safety information, or other practices of those sites or sellers. Your use of those sites is governed by their own terms and policies.
9. Advertising
The Site is supported by display advertising as well as affiliate links. Ads are served by Google AdSense and its advertising partners, and the ad script loads for every visitor. Our cookie banner controls whether those ads are personalized, not whether they appear; visitors in the EEA, the UK, and Switzerland see Google's own certified consent message, which governs personalization in those regions. The Privacy Policy and Cookie Policy have the detail.
We do not choose, write, review, or endorse the individual ads that appear. Ad content, targeting, and the pages an ad links to are controlled by the advertiser and the ad network, not by us. An ad appearing on Grumpy Capy is not a recommendation, an endorsement, or a statement that we have checked the advertiser, its products, its claims, or its website. To the fullest extent permitted by law, we are not responsible or liable for advertiser content, offers, or pricing, or for anything that happens on a third-party site you reach by clicking an ad. If an ad here looks like a scam or otherwise breaks Google's policies, tell us through the contact page and we will report it.
You agree not to click, or cause any person, bot, script, or service to click, ads on the Site in an artificial or fraudulent way. That includes clicking your own ads or the same ad repeatedly to inflate revenue, automated or incentivized clicks, click exchanges, and paid traffic schemes — anything the ad network treats as invalid traffic. This kind of activity can cost us the ad account, and we may block access and report it.
We may display ads anywhere on the Site, add, remove, or change ad partners, formats, and placements, and change how the Site is monetized, at any time and without notice. We may also run the Site with fewer ads, or none.
10. Disclaimer of warranties
Content on this site is provided for informational, editorial, and entertainment purposes only. Nothing on Grumpy Capy is legal, medical, veterinary, financial, or other professional advice, and nothing here guarantees a product result, suitability, or outcome for your particular situation. Opinions, commentary, memes, and curated picks reflect editorial judgment at the time of publication; product details, prices, stock status, shipping timelines, and marketplace listings may change after publication.
The Services are provided "as is" and "as available", without warranties of any kind, whether express or implied, including (to the maximum extent permitted by law) warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, non-infringement, and uninterrupted availability. We do not warrant that the Services will be error-free, secure, or always available. To the fullest extent permitted by applicable law, your use of the site and any reliance on its content is at your own risk.
11. Limitation of liability
To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, in no event shall Grumpy Capy or its operator (Data Sauna LLC) be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages, or for any loss of profits, revenue, data, goodwill, or business opportunities, arising out of or in connection with your use of (or inability to use) the Services — even if we have been advised of the possibility of such damages.
Nothing in these Terms excludes or limits liability that cannot be excluded under applicable law (for example, liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, fraud, or fraudulent misrepresentation, or statutory consumer rights that cannot be waived).
12. Indemnification
You agree to defend, indemnify, and hold harmless Grumpy Capy and its operator (Data Sauna LLC) from and against any claims, liabilities, damages, losses, and expenses (including reasonable legal fees) arising out of (a) your breach of these Terms, (b) your misuse of the Services, (c) any content you submit to the sightings wall, including any claim that it infringes a third party's copyright, privacy, or publicity rights, or (d) your violation of any applicable law or third-party right.
13. Termination
We may suspend or terminate your access to the Services at any time, with or without notice, if you breach these Terms or for any other reason we believe is reasonable (for example, to protect the Site from abuse). Sections that by their nature should survive termination (intellectual property, the submission licence in section 5 for anything still published, disclaimers, limitation of liability, indemnification, governing law) will continue to apply.
14. Governing law and disputes
These Terms and any non-contractual obligations arising out of them are governed by the laws of the State of Wyoming, United States, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. The state and federal courts located in Wyoming shall have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute arising out of or in connection with the Services or these Terms, and you consent to personal jurisdiction in those courts. Nothing in this clause prevents you from bringing a claim in the courts of your country or state of residence where mandatory consumer-protection laws give you that right.
15. Changes to these Terms
We may update these Terms from time to time. Material changes will be reflected in the "Effective" and "Last updated" dates at the top. Continued use of the Services after changes take effect means you accept the updated Terms.
16. Severability
If any provision of these Terms is held by a court or other tribunal of competent jurisdiction to be unenforceable, that provision will be limited or eliminated to the minimum extent necessary, and the remaining provisions will remain in full force and effect.
17. Entire agreement
These Terms, together with our Privacy Policy and Cookie Policy, are the entire agreement between you and us regarding the Services and supersede any prior agreements on the same subject matter.
18. Contact
Questions about these Terms, permission requests, or anything else? Reach us through the contact page or use the social links in the footer.