How to keep track of medications for pets

If you only have one pet who needs medicating, you may not need this.

But if you have more than one pet on medications, or if your one pet has multiple medications on different dispensing schedules, or if you have substitute caretakers who occasionally look after your pet,  you may want to start making a little chart for their meds.

(this also comes in handy when you have a migraine & disappear into the bedroom for 24h. You won't have to stumble out to groan don't forget to give Fifi the medicine. 2mls of the pink liquid. and three blue pills in the morning. NO! Not 2 pills and  3mls.......! sorry must go vomit now....
You'll be so much happier with this method, trust me.)

In our home, we have an old cat with chronic illness,  three dogs with various ailments - chronic & otherwise, and we often foster rats who are suffering from infection and need antibiotics.

That's a lot of noses to medicate & keep track of so I have this simple method of charting.

Each animal requiring meds gets an index card.

Write the name of the animal in one corner, the medication & dosage in the other corner.

Down below, write out all the dosage dates or times. Then, when the medicine has been administered, place a tick on the correct line.

The index cards are all on the side of the fridge, right beside the medicine drawer.

This is Daisy's for her estradiol. It used to be once a week & she didn't have a card - I just remembered Wednesdays. But she's been upped to every 6 days and that was too much to keep track of in my head, so she gets a card:

Here's a sample one I made up for a more acute illness. Here the animal is getting antibiotics for 8 days, every 12 hours.

For more complicated charting, you could use a chart like this:

This is Bear's chart (from last year) for the first 5 days post-op. He was on 3 different medications & they were all on different schedules. Percocet at 6AM, 2PM and 10PM; Cephalexin at 7AM and 7PM; Famotidine at 2PM but only for a couple days. Notice I also kept track of pee & poop as we wanted to be sure things were working well.

If your pet is showing adverse effects, or throwing up their meds, you would also note it in their record, specifying how soon after the medication was administered, and how frequent. This is important information to have when calling your vet about how the pet is doing on the medication.


After the card is used up, I file it in the animal's records. I keep a 'dummy' file of vet records, lab results & my own notes of the pet's health & just drop the cards in there.