This page is not veterinary advice. Paw Multiverse is not a veterinary practice. We cannot examine, diagnose or treat your animal. There are no medicines here, no doses, no home remedies and no treatment steps, on purpose. If your pet is unwell, has swallowed something, or has changed in a way you cannot explain, ring your vet or your nearest emergency clinic and let them decide. Full disclaimer.
This sheet has a bigger sibling. Keep this one-pager on the fridge door, and keep the full version in the drawer underneath: The Pet Emergency Folder expands every line here into a system - the identity page, the weight log, the medical record, the contact chain, the money page, the go-bag, and a printable twelve-card pack you fill in with a pen.
Print this page (or save it as PDF) and stick it on the fridge. When a pet emergency happens, nobody thinks clearly - this one-pager does the thinking for you. Use your browser’s Print button; the page is formatted to print clean on one to two pages.
🚨 In an emergency: the 4 steps
- Secure your pet and the substance. Take the packaging of whatever was eaten.
- Call your vet or emergency clinic - numbers below. Don’t wait for symptoms.
- Never induce vomiting unless a professional instructs you.
- Check the dose with our free calculators (QR-free shortcut: pawmultiverse.com → Tools).
📞 My emergency numbers (fill in now, not during the emergency)
| My regular vet | _________________________________ |
| Nearest 24h emergency clinic | _________________________________ |
| Backup clinic | _________________________________ |
| Pet poison hotline (if available in your country) | _________________________________ |
| Microchip numbers | _________________________________ |
Find clinics worldwide: pawmultiverse.com/find-an-emergency-vet-near-you-worldwide
☠️ Never let your pet eat these
| Food/item | Danger | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Xylitol / “birch sugar” / E967 | 🔴 Extreme (dogs) | Sugar-free gum, mints, some peanut butters - tiny amounts can kill |
| Chocolate & cocoa | 🔴 High | Darker = worse; use our dose calculator |
| Grapes & raisins | 🔴 High (dogs) | No safe dose known - kidney failure risk; call always |
| Human painkillers | 🔴 Extreme | Paracetamol can kill a cat at ANY dose; ibuprofen ulcers/kidneys |
| Onion, garlic, leek, chives | 🟠 High | Raw, cooked or powder; symptoms delayed 1-5 days |
| Macadamia nuts | 🟠 High (dogs) | Weakness, tremors within 12h |
| Alcohol & raw yeast dough | 🟠 High | Dough expands and ferments in the stomach |
| Caffeine | 🟠 High | Coffee grounds and tea bags included |
| Lilies | 🔴 Extreme (cats) | Even pollen - kidney failure; all parts toxic |
| Avocado, mouldy food, cooked bones | 🟡 Moderate | GI trouble, obstruction and splinter risks |
⚠️ Go to the vet NOW if you see
Collapse or can’t stand · seizures · struggling to breathe · pale/blue/yellow gums · bloated hard belly (especially large dogs - bloat kills in hours) · male cat straining to urinate · repeated vomiting · suspected poisoning · unresponsive or “not right” after trauma.
🧰 Ready-in-advance checklist
☐ Vet numbers filled in above ☐ Out-of-hours address saved in your maps app ☐ Pet weight, with the date measured ☐ Microchip number + database, details current ☐ Insurance policy / claims line ☐ Who drives, and who else can consent ☐ Towel/blanket for transport ☐ Carrier accessible, not buried in storage ☐ Pet’s medication list & medical records photo on your phone
From pawmultiverse.com - free pet safety tools & guides. This sheet is general information, not veterinary advice.
What this sheet is for, and what it deliberately leaves out
There is no first aid on this page. No steps, no doses, no techniques, no improvised treatments. That is not an oversight and it is not squeamishness. It is the single decision that makes the rest of the sheet worth printing.
An emergency sheet that tries to teach treatment competes for attention with the phone. In the two minutes when somebody is frightened and reading fast, the useful output is a phone call to a person who can act, not an attempt to perform something learned from a fridge magnet. So this sheet is built entirely around getting that call made quickly and making it a good call.
Every toxicology source we cite across this site ends in the same instruction. Cornell’s canine health centre, read on 4 August 2026, tells owners to “call your veterinarian or a pet poison control center immediately”, and adds that “early action can significantly improve the chance of preventing or minimizing kidney damage”. International Cat Care, read the same day, writes of lily exposure that “this is an emergency and requires urgent veterinary care”. None of them tells the owner to do something first.
The three numbers, and why the third one exists
Almost everybody has the first number. Fewer have the second. Very few have the third, and the third is the one that changes outcomes at two in the morning.
| Number | What it is | Why people get caught out |
|---|---|---|
| Day-time practice | Your registered veterinary practice. | Usually in a phone. Rarely on the wall where a babysitter, a visiting relative or a panicking teenager can find it. |
| Out of hours | The provider your practice uses at night and at weekends, which is often a different business at a different address. | People assume their own practice answers at night. Many do not. The address matters as much as the number, because you will be driving to it. |
| Animal poison line | A national service that advises on ingestions, usually staffed around the clock. | Most owners do not know their country has one until they need it. It is a different service from a vet and it is often the fastest route to a specific answer about a specific substance. |
Write all three somewhere physical. Not only in a phone, because the phone may be the thing you are using to make the call, and because the person who needs the number may not be you.
The information a vet asks for, in the order they ask for it
Emergency calls are triaged. The person on the other end is deciding, very quickly, whether you should come in now, come in later, or be talked through something on the phone. What you say in the first thirty seconds determines how well that goes.
The things they will want are consistent across every source we read: which species, roughly what weight, what happened, what was involved, how much as best you know, and when. That last one is the one owners most often leave out and most often matters most.
Time is the recurring theme in the toxicology literature we have cited elsewhere on this site. Grape and raisin ingestion produces signs at six to twelve hours by the MSD Veterinary Manual’s account, with renal failure at twenty-four to seventy-two. Allium haemolysis typically arrives at three to five days. Xylitol liver injury may hold off for a day or two after the sugar crash. In every one of those, “when” is a more useful answer than “how much”, and it is the answer you are most able to give accurately.
the first thirty seconds
-------------------------------
"my [dog / cat], about [X] kg,
has [eaten / done / got into]
[what], about [how much],
at about [what time].
She is currently [what you can
see, plainly, without guessing
at a diagnosis]."
then stop talking and listen.
have ready but do not volunteer
unless asked:
- age
- anything the vet already knows
about
- anything else eaten today
- the packet, in your hand
- microchip number
do not: make the animal sick,
give anything from a cupboard,
wait to see if it passes.
Describing what you can see, rather than what you think it means, is worth practising. “He is breathing faster than normal and will not settle” is more useful than “I think he is in shock”. Our page on what to have ready before you ring the vet goes into that in more depth, and pet body language helps with the vocabulary.
The bag, and what actually belongs in it
Emergency pack lists online tend to fill up with equipment, most of which is either useless to an untrained person or is a treatment we are not going to recommend. Ours is short, and everything on it is either a document, a container or a means of communication.
Documents travel badly in a crisis, which is why they should be copied and photographed in advance. Containers matter because getting an animal into a car safely is a genuine problem, particularly for a cat. Communication matters because the person who finds the animal is not always the person who knows its history.
What we are not going to list: anything you would apply, administer, wrap, flush or give. If a vet or a poison line asks you to do something and talks you through it, that is a different situation entirely, and it will be their instruction rather than ours.
What we could not source
We could not find a published emergency-preparedness standard for pet owners from a veterinary body. There are many such lists online; we could not trace one to an authority of the standard we cite for toxicology, so this page is built from what the emergency and toxicology sources repeatedly ask owners to have, rather than from a single checklist we can attribute.
We could not source national animal poison line numbers for every country, and we are not printing a partial list that would be wrong for most readers. Find yours now, before you need it, and write it on the sheet.
We could not source any evidence on whether owners who prepare in advance have better outcomes. It seems obviously true and we have no study to cite for it.
We could not, and will not, source or publish any first aid procedure, dose, or home treatment. That is the standing rule and this page is the clearest case for it.
Printable: the fridge sheet
Print it. Fill in the numbers by hand. Put it where a stranger in your kitchen would find it, which is usually the fridge door rather than a drawer.
Ticks are held until you reload. Print it, then write the numbers on by hand.
Written on the sheet, not just in a phone
About each animal, in one line each
In the bag or by the door
Household rules everyone knows
Reviewed twice a year
The fridge sheet and the vet call card are meant to live in the same place: one carries the numbers, the other carries the details of your own animal. The card also prints blank. For the visit itself, see what happens at the emergency vet.
Related pages
The fuller document set lives on the pet emergency folder page, and this sheet is the one-page version of it. For the moment itself, pet emergency, the triage helper and before you call the vet. If something has been eaten, use the poison control directory, the poison control directory or the poison control directorys. If an animal is missing rather than unwell, the lost pet poster. And for the calm version of all of this, written before anything happens, the pet care plan and the poison control directory.
