Before our judges chose the individual winners, we had to approve the top 10 finalists. So we went through all the top entries as chosen by the public and subtracted any "extra" votes each photo received (that is, whenever an individual voted for a photo several times under different e-mail addresses -- which was against the contest's rules), in order to get a more accurate count of how many people actually voted for it. Thankfully, this wasn't that big of a deal: pet lovers are very honest!

Then our esteemed panel of judges -- representatives from SPCA International and some of the contest's sponsors -- each made their choices for the grand prize recipient and the other prize winners. These decisions were primarily based on the judges' personal tastes, but they also factored in which photos received the most votes and the highest ratings from the public, and which had the fewest "extra" votes.