This is not veterinary advice. This page is a blank form. It does not assess your animal, it does not tell you whether this is an emergency, and it does not tell you what to do. Its only job is to help you write down the things a veterinary practice or a poison line will ask you for, so that you have them in front of you when you speak to one. If you think your animal is in trouble, phone a vet.
A veterinary emergency call is a structured interview. The person on the other end works through the same set of questions almost every time, because those questions are what let them decide how quickly you need to be seen and what they need to prepare before you arrive. The questions are not a secret. Pet Poison Helpline publishes its list openly, and so does the UK Animal PoisonLine. Both publish it as running prose in a paragraph.
That is the whole problem this page exists to solve. Nobody standing in a kitchen at two in the morning, with a dog that has just eaten something and a phone in the other hand, reads a paragraph and pulls eighteen separate items out of it in the right order. So here is the same information as a card you can fill in, read down the phone, print, or photograph.
Nothing you type into this card is sent anywhere. There is no form to submit, no server to receive it and no analytics attached to these fields. The card is plain HTML in the page you are already looking at, and what you type stays in the tab until you close it or clear it.
2. What happened
3. What you have seen, and when
4. Medical background
5. Who you are calling, and how they reach you
6. What they tell you, written down during the call
Two ways to use this card, and the quiet one matters more
The obvious way is the emergency. Something has happened, you are about to phone, and you fill in what you can in the ninety seconds before somebody answers. Fill in section 1 and the top of section 2 first. Those are the parts nobody can look up for you and the parts you will forget under stress.
The other way is the one that actually changes how the call goes. Print this card blank, or fill in sections 1, 4 and 5 while nothing is wrong, and put it somewhere you can reach with one hand. On the fridge, inside the food bin lid, in the folder with the vaccination record. Section 1 does not change from week to week. Neither does your practice number, your out of hours provider, or your insurance policy number. If those are already written down, then on the night it matters you are only filling in section 2 and section 3, which is the part that is actually about tonight.
There is a version of this that people already do badly. They save the practice number in their phone, and then at eleven at night the practice number rings out and a recorded message gives them a different number, spoken once, and they have nothing to write on. Section 5 exists because of that recording. Ask your practice, in daylight, who covers their nights, and write both numbers down.
Where the list of questions comes from
We did not invent this list. Every item in sections 1, 2 and 4 comes from what the poison services themselves publish about what they will ask you. We read the following on 5 August 2026 and the card was built from them.
Pet Poison Helpline publishes a page describing what to expect when you call it. It sets out, in a paragraph, the information the caller should have ready: the name of the poison, plant or product, its ingredients, how much was taken, the time of the exposure, and further details off the pack such as its style, colour, brand, size, package size and its EPA registration number where it has one. Then, about the animal: species and breed, sex and neuter status, age and weight, medical history, and current medications. The same page describes the shape of the call itself. The service confirms your contact details, confirms that there is a consultation fee, assesses the case, and issues a case number that you or your vet can quote afterwards. It also states that follow up calls carry no extra charge, in its words: “There is no charge for any follow-up calls”. Source: Pet Poison Helpline, what to expect when you call, read 5 August 2026.
Animal PoisonLine, the owner facing service run in the United Kingdom by the Veterinary Poisons Information Service, publishes its own list, and it is not identical. It asks for the animal’s name, age, breed and weight; what the animal was exposed to, by product or drug name; how the exposure happened, whether that was eating it, breathing it in or getting it on the skin; how long ago it happened; how much was involved; and whether the animal has been exposed to the same thing before. Two of those, the route and the previous exposure, do not appear on the Pet Poison Helpline list, which is why they are on this card. The service describes its own job as advising “whether or not your pet needs a visit to the vet”, and it charges a fee that differs between daytime and out of hours. Source: Animal PoisonLine, read 5 August 2026.
The ASPCA Animal Poison Control Center is the third service people are most often pointed at, and here is the honest finding. On 5 August 2026 we read its main animal poison control page, its page on what to do if your pet is poisoned, and its frequently asked questions page. None of the three publishes a list of what to have ready before you call. They publish the number and state that a consultation fee may apply. We are recording that absence rather than quietly padding our card with items we then attribute to them. Source: ASPCA Animal Poison Control Center, read 5 August 2026.
Sections 3, 5 and 6 of the card are ours, not theirs. Section 3 exists because what you have seen is the thing you are worst at reporting under pressure and best at reporting if you wrote it down as it happened. Section 5 exists because a person giving their own address while frightened is the single most common place a call stalls. Section 6 exists because the answer you are given is worth nothing if you cannot repeat it accurately ten minutes later to somebody else. None of those three sections is attributed to any authority, because no authority published them.
Why there are no phone numbers printed on this card
You will notice the card asks you to write down the numbers rather than printing them for you. That is deliberate and it is not laziness. Practice numbers change. Out of hours arrangements change, sometimes at a month’s notice, and the number that answers on a Tuesday afternoon is frequently not the number that answers on a Sunday night. Poison services differ by country, charge different fees, and some of them will not take a call from outside their own territory at all.
A printed number on a page like this one goes stale silently, and a stale emergency number is worse than no number, because it costs you the ninety seconds you spend listening to it ring. The number that is right is the one you checked yourself and wrote down yourself. If you want help finding the practices near you, use our emergency vet finder, which searches from where you are rather than telling you who to ring, and the pet emergency page for how the services fit together.
What this card deliberately does not do
It does not decide whether this is an emergency. It has no scoring, no traffic lights and no thresholds. If you fill in every box, the card will look exactly the same as it did when it was blank, because it is a form and not a judgement.
It does not tell you what to do. There are no doses on it, no medicines, no first aid techniques, no instructions about making an animal sick, and nothing you could mistake for a treatment. Those decisions belong to a veterinary surgeon who has heard the case, and in most countries they are legally restricted to one.
It does not interpret what you type. If you write that your dog ate a whole packet of something an hour ago, the card will not tell you that this is bad, or that it is fine, because both of those statements would be veterinary advice from a publisher that is not a veterinary practice. What the card does is make sure that when a vet asks you the fourth question in a row, you already have the answer in front of you instead of walking to the bin to look.
The one place on this site where published numbers do appear is the poison control directory, and every threshold there sits next to the publisher who printed it and the date we read it. That is a deliberate division: numbers live where their sources live, and never anywhere else.
Nothing you type here leaves your browser
This matters more on this page than on most, because we are asking you to type your address and your phone number into a form while you are frightened. So here is exactly what happens to it, in plain terms you can check.
The card is not inside a form element. There is nothing to submit and no address for it to be submitted to.
There is no code on this page that reads what you type and sends it anywhere. The only script attached to this page adds three buttons: print, save, and clear. It does not transmit.
If you press the save button, what you typed is written into this browser’s own local storage, on this device only. It is not uploaded. The clear button removes it again. If you never press save, closing the tab loses everything, which for a lot of people is the right behaviour.
If you are on a shared or borrowed device, do not press save. Print or photograph the card instead.
You can verify all of that yourself. View the page source and search for the word form. There is not one.
Printing it, and photographing it
Printing is set up so that only the card prints. The site header, the menu, this explanation and everything else disappears, and the card lands on the paper on its own, in black, with a ruled line under every answer. That works whether the boxes are full or empty, so the same page gives you a filled card now and a blank card for the fridge.
A photograph works just as well and is faster. Fill in what you can, screenshot the card, and the picture is now on your phone where it survives the tab closing, the battery dying at the wrong moment, and the walk to the car. If you are going to be handing the phone to somebody else at the practice, a screenshot is easier to hand over than a live page.
The honest limits of this card
It cannot make you a good observer. Section 3 asks what you have seen, and most people, asked that question cold, answer with a conclusion rather than an observation. They say the dog is in pain, when what they saw was a dog that would not settle and turned to look at its own side. The second version is more useful to a clinician and it is harder to say. Writing it down slows you enough to say the useful version.
It cannot fill in the amount for you. Estimating how much of something an animal has taken is genuinely hard, and the honest answer is often a range or an upper bound rather than a number. A vet would far rather hear that between a third and a whole packet is missing than hear a confident figure that turns out to be invented.
It cannot help if the packet is gone. If the wrapper is in the bin, get the wrapper out of the bin. If it went out with the collection, write down the brand and where you bought it, and say plainly that you no longer have it. That is a much better answer than a guessed ingredient list.
It cannot replace the call. A completed card with nobody on the other end of the phone has done nothing at all. The card exists to make one phone call go better, and that is the whole of its ambition.
What we checked, and what we could not
Every item in sections 1, 2 and 4 was traced back to a service that publishes it. Where the two services differ, the card carries the union of the two lists rather than the intersection, because a question you were not asked costs nothing and a question you cannot answer costs time.
We could not find a published, quantified study measuring whether callers who have this information ready get better outcomes than callers who do not. We looked. If it exists we have not found it, and we are not going to imply a number that nobody has measured. What can be said, and is said above, is that these are the questions the services state they will ask, and that they are asked in a rough order that this card follows.
We also cannot tell you what any of these services charges today, so we have not printed a fee. Both services that publish a fee also publish that it changes, and one of them charges differently at night. Check the current figure on their own page before you decide who to ring.
Where to go from here
If you want to understand why each of these questions is asked, and what a good answer to each one sounds like, that is the long companion piece: before you call the vet. If you want to know what happens after the call, when you are actually standing in the waiting room, read what happens at the emergency vet.
Something has just been eaten: my dog ate something or my cat ate something.
Trying to work out how serious it is: the emergency triage hub, which walks the signs that mean a phone call cannot wait.
Published thresholds with their sources: the poison control directory, and for one substance specifically, the chocolate calculator.
A plant rather than a food: the poison control directory.
Something you can check on the animal while you wait to be answered: the gum colour page, which explains what a vet means when they ask you about gums.
Things that should never be done at home: the first aid hub.
Keeping the paperwork together: the pet emergency folder and the poison control directory.
Stopping it happening again: pet proofing your home.
Everything else we have built: all tools and calculators.
Not veterinary advice. This page is a blank form and an explanation of where its questions came from. It does not assess your animal and it does not tell you what to do. No part of it should be used instead of speaking to a veterinary surgeon. If you think something is wrong, phone your vet, your out of hours provider or a poison service now.
If you looked up an amount before filling this in. Write the number down on the card by all means, and say where you got it when you are asked. But it is background for the clinician, not a reason to stay at home. Poison control directory sets out why a figure beneath a published line is not the same thing as an animal that is fine.
