Build a Health Baseline Now, While They're Well

Here's a problem that plays out in veterinary practices every day.

An owner phones, worried. The vet asks how fast the dog is breathing. The owner doesn't know what's normal for him. The vet asks about weight — the owner isn't sure. Has he been drinking more? Maybe? It's hard to say.

Everyone is now working from impressions rather than information, and impressions during a crisis are unreliable.

The fix is to record a handful of numbers while your pet is perfectly healthy. It takes about twenty minutes once, plus a few minutes a month afterwards.

The core baseline

Weight. The single most useful. Record it monthly with the date. See our piece on monthly weighing for the practicalities.

Resting respiratory rate. Count the breaths while they're asleep — one rise and fall together is one breath. Count 30 seconds, double it. Most healthy animals sit around 15–25. Under 30 is the general normal ceiling. This is a genuinely powerful early warning for heart and lung disease.

Heart rate. Hand on the chest behind the left elbow, or feel the femoral pulse on the inner thigh. Count 15 seconds and multiply by four. Dogs vary widely by size — roughly 60–140, with small dogs faster. Cats are 140–220.

Gum colour and capillary refill time. Lift the lip. Note the normal colour — bubblegum pink for most, though some breeds have pigmented gums. Press until it blanches, release, count. Under two seconds is normal.

Temperature. Requires a digital thermometer and lubricant, taken rectally. Normal is roughly 38–39.2°C for dogs and cats. Worth doing once so you know how they react and what their normal is.

Body condition score. Feel the ribs, look for a waist from above and a tuck from the side. Note whether you can feel ribs easily, and photograph them from above and from the side.

The daily-life baseline

These are less clinical and equally useful, because they're what changes first.

Appetite. How much do they actually eat, measured, not estimated? Weigh out a day's food once so you know the real number.

Water intake. Measure a full 24 hours once. Fill the bowl with a measured volume, note top-ups, measure what's left the next day. Rough figures are fine. Normal is broadly 40–60ml per kg per day from all sources, but the useful thing is *their* number.

Toileting. How many times a day, roughly. For cats, how many clumps in the tray and how big.

Sleep. How many hours, and where.

Activity. How far can they comfortably walk? Can they jump onto the bed, the counter, into the car? Can they manage stairs?

Behaviour. What's their normal greeting? Do they meet you at the door? Where do they lie?

The visual baseline

Photograph them properly, once, while they're well.

From directly above, standing
From the side, standing
Face on
Any existing lumps, with a coin or ruler for scale

Date them. Six months later these are more informative than any memory, and they're the reference point when someone asks "has he lost condition?"

The record that matters in an emergency

Keep this somewhere findable — phone, fridge, wallet:

Full name, breed, date of birth or approximate age
Current weight
Microchip number
Current medications, with doses
Known conditions and allergies
Vaccination status and dates
Vet's name, number and address
After-hours emergency hospital, number and address
Insurance policy number
Normal resting respiratory rate, heart rate, gum colour

When a vet at 11pm asks what he weighs and what he's on, having this in one place rather than in your head is worth a lot.

Get a blood baseline too

This is the one owners skip because it costs money, and it's arguably the highest value of all.

Ask for a full blood panel and urinalysis while your pet is healthy — ideally from middle age, around five to seven for dogs, and by about eight for cats.

The reason isn't to find disease. It's that reference ranges are population-wide and wide. A kidney value in the upper half of normal may be entirely normal for one animal and a significant change for another whose baseline was at the bottom.

Without a baseline, a result that's technically "within range" tells your vet very little. With one, a shift within the normal range can be an early warning.

This is standard practice in human medicine and under-used in veterinary.

Many practices offer discounted wellness screening panels. It's worth asking.

How often to update

Weight: monthly
Resting respiratory rate: monthly for healthy pets, weekly for seniors, daily if there's diagnosed heart disease
Photos: every three to six months
Body condition: monthly, when you weigh
Water intake: every couple of months, or whenever you have a suspicion
Blood work: annually from middle age, twice yearly from senior

The payoff

Two scenarios.

Without a baseline: "He seems a bit off. He's maybe breathing a bit fast? I think he's lost a bit of weight but I'm not sure."

With a baseline: "His resting rate is 42, normally 20. He's dropped from 28.4kg to 26.9kg since March. Water intake has gone from about 600ml to over a litre a day."

The second owner gets a much faster, much more accurate answer. The vet knows where to look.

That difference costs twenty minutes today and a few minutes a month afterwards.

Our community tracker is built around exactly this — you set the baseline once, log the monthly numbers in a few taps, and it flags the changes rather than leaving you to spot them. But the tool is secondary. Do it in a notebook if you prefer. Just do it while they're well, because you cannot construct a baseline retrospectively.