What belongs in a pet medical record?
Why keep your own copy at all
Your vet has the real file. The reason to keep your own is that theirs is not available to the people who need it most, at the times they need it.
- A sitter at 7am needs the dose, not the diagnosis, and cannot call your practice.
- An emergency hospital at 2am has no access to your regular vet’s system. What you can tell them in the first two minutes changes what happens next.
- A new practice starts with nothing unless you bring something.
- Boarding, travel, grooming and daycare all ask for vaccination dates, and always at the least convenient moment.
- Whoever steps in if you can’t has no relationship with your vet at all.
None of that requires clinical detail. It requires a short, current, findable summary — which is a different document, and one only you can maintain.
Identity and identification
- Name, species, breed, sex, and whether neutered or spayed.
- Date of birth or best estimate.
- Colour and markings, described well enough for a stranger to match.
- Microchip number and the company it is registered with. The number is useless without the registration behind it being current, and registrations go stale silently when people move or change phone numbers.
- Licence or registration number if your area requires one.
- Recent photographs, front and side, showing size and markings. Update them yearly — animals change, and a photograph from three years ago is a poor match.
Check your microchip registration today. It is the highest-value five minutes in this guide. A chip is a number; the number only returns your pet if the details attached to it are ones somebody can reach.
Vaccinations
For each one, record the vaccine, the date it was given, and the date the next is due.
- Rabies. The one with legal consequences. Required for licensing in most places, demanded by boarding facilities, and central to how a bite incident is handled. Keep the certificate itself, not just the date.
- Core vaccines — the distemper/parvovirus combinations dogs and cats are given on a standard schedule.
- Lifestyle vaccines — bordetella, leptospirosis, Lyme and others, given depending on where you live and what your animal does. Boarding kennels commonly require bordetella specifically.
The due date is the field people skip and the field everyone asks for. Record it even when it is a year away.
Medications
Everything currently given, and enough detail for someone else to give it correctly.
- Drug name as it appears on the packet, including the strength.
- The dose in real terms — “half a 10mg tablet”, not “one tablet”.
- How often, at what times, and with or without food.
- What it is for, in a few words.
- Prescribing vet, and when the prescription needs renewing.
- Start date, and end date if it is a course rather than ongoing.
- How it is actually administered, if there is a trick to it.
Keep preventatives here too — flea, tick and heartworm — with the date last given. They are easy to lose track of and the gap is invisible until it isn’t.
Conditions and allergies
- Ongoing conditions, when diagnosed, and how they are managed day to day.
- Allergies and adverse reactions — to foods, to drugs, to anything. Note what the reaction was, because “sensitive to” and “anaphylaxis” need different handling.
- Past surgeries and significant illnesses, with rough dates.
- Anything a vet who has never met this animal would want to know in the first thirty seconds.
Write drug reactions in the most prominent place you have. It is the single piece of information most likely to change what an emergency vet does, and the one they cannot look up.
Weight and measurements
Weight is worth recording over time rather than once, for two reasons. Doses are calculated from it — an emergency vet asking for a current weight is asking a clinical question — and a trend nobody was tracking is the way slow changes go unnoticed for a year.
Record the weight and the date each time it is taken, at a vet visit or at home.
Your vets
- Your regular practice: name, address, phone, and any client or patient number.
- Your nearest 24-hour emergency hospital, separately. Different place, different hours, and the one nobody can find under pressure. Look it up now and write it down.
- Any specialist your pet sees.
- Pet insurance: provider, policy number, and what it covers.
- Who else you have authorised to bring your pet in and approve routine treatment.
Documents worth keeping
- The rabies certificate.
- Vaccination history from your practice.
- Microchip registration confirmation.
- Adoption or purchase paperwork, and any pedigree documents.
- Recent test results, if there is an ongoing condition.
- Your insurance policy document.
- Anything from a previous vet, especially if you have moved.
Photographs of paper are fine. A legible photo of a certificate is a usable record, and it is infinitely better than a certificate in a drawer in a house you cannot get to.
Care instructions — the part vets don’t hold
No clinical file contains any of this, and it is what a real person standing in your kitchen actually needs:
- Food, amount, times, and where it is kept.
- The daily routine — walks, when they go out, where they sleep.
- Fears, triggers, and whether they bolt through open doors.
- What must not happen: foods, situations, other animals.
- The comforts — the toy, the blanket, the particular chair.
The full version is the pet sitter checklist, and it is worth keeping in the same place as the medical detail, since the person who needs one usually needs both.
Keeping it somewhere useful
A record has to satisfy three conditions, and most fail at least one:
- Current. A record you last updated two vets ago will be wrong in the places that matter — doses change.
- Reachable by someone else. A file only you can open is a file that does not exist on the day you cannot open it. This rules out the notes app nobody else can see.
- Findable under pressure. A folder in a drawer is excellent at home and useless in a car park at 2am.
Paper on the fridge and a photo of it on your phone satisfies all three and costs nothing. Anything more organised only helps if you will actually keep it up.
One caution, since this is health information. A pet record is a summary, not a clinical judgement. It makes a veterinarian faster and a caregiver correct; it does not interpret anything. Changes in your animal’s health are a conversation with your vet.
Common questions
- Is my own pet record the same as my vet's medical record?
- No, and it should not try to be. Your vet holds the clinical file — examination findings, diagnoses, test results, treatment decisions — and that is the authoritative medical document. What you keep is a practical summary: identification, what your pet takes, what it reacts to, who treats it, and how it is cared for. The two overlap and serve different readers.
- What vaccinations should I have a record of?
- Rabies first, because it is the one with legal weight — boarding, travel, licensing and any bite incident all turn on it. Beyond that, whatever your vet gives on their schedule, typically distemper/parvo combinations and, depending on lifestyle and region, bordetella, leptospirosis or Lyme. Record the date given and the date due, since the due date is the one anybody ever asks for.
- How do I get my pet's records from my vet?
- Ask. Practices will normally provide a copy of your animal's records on request, often by email, and many have an online portal. Ask for vaccination history specifically if that is what you need — it is the part most commonly requested and usually the quickest to produce.
- What should I do with old records from a previous vet?
- Keep them, and give a copy to your current practice. Vaccination history, past reactions and chronic conditions carry across, and a new practice cannot infer any of it. If you have paper only, photograph each page — a legible photo is a usable record.
- Does a pet record replace advice from a veterinarian?
- No. A record is information, not interpretation. It helps a vet act faster and helps a caregiver act correctly, and neither of those is the same as a diagnosis. Anything that looks like a change in your pet's health is a conversation with a veterinarian.
Where Woof fits
The Woof Pet Record is this list, built as a real record rather than a note you meant to finish. It is included with free Woof: identity and microchip, vaccinations with due dates, medications with structured schedules, conditions, allergies, weight over time, both vets, documents, and the care instructions a stranger would need.
You can send someone a temporary link to it — a sitter, a family member, a new vet — and it works in a browser with no account and stops working on its own. How to get into your home is excluded from a share by the database itself, so it cannot be included by accident.
Woof AI can read a vet document you upload and propose the entries, so filling this in is less typing. Two things it deliberately does not do: nothing it extracts reaches your record until you confirm it, and it does not diagnose or give medical advice. It reads paperwork and points at things worth asking your veterinarian about.
The same record is what Woof gives your Safety Network if you ever can’t get home, which is the reason it exists in a safety app at all.
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Woof is free on iPhone. Check-ins, your Safety Network and the Woof Pet Record cost nothing and don’t expire.