Pet Care Continuity
The handover document for the person who looks after the dog when you can't.
What this brief is
Vet, microchip number, insurance, feeding routine, medication, behavioural notes, the named guardian. Designed to live alongside the First Contact Card on the kitchen noticeboard, and to read as institutional rather than improvised.
How this brief is read
Read the sample on this page, using the Pemberton-Walsh household throughout.
Open a free account and the brief becomes editable with your own data — your records, your trusted persons, your professional advisers.
Household Continuity Dossier membership (£195 first year, then £99/year) holds the record on the register, prompts the annual review, and issues the Governance Letter when a circumstance changes.
From the brief
Britain has 12 million dogs, 11 million cats, and millions more rabbits, parrots, fish, and small mammals living as members of households. Almost none appear in a will. None appear in a probate inventory. All of them depend on specific routines, medication, suppliers, and recognition that exist only in the head of the person who looks after them.
When the principal caregiver is suddenly ill, hospitalised, incapacitated, abroad without warning, or dies, the pet is the family member most likely to end up in a rescue centre within the first month. Not because anyone wishes it. Because no one knew where the special food was, or that the medication has to be split in two and given in cheese, or which vet has the records, or that the neighbour is willing to take the cat but allergic to the dog.
Pets are not assets. Under UK law pets are personal chattels — they pass with the residue of the estate unless specifically gifted. But this brief is not a legal instrument. It is the operational handover that makes the legal arrangement actually work: an emergency carer who knows the routine, funded by the estate, with the vet's number to hand.
Each pet, on one card
For each pet: microchip number and registration; vet name, address, and account reference; insurance provider and policy number; diet and feeding routine (exact brand, exact quantity — do not assume); medication (what, when, how administered); behavioural notes for the emergency carer; named guardian and their contact details.
The full brief continues — personalised with your household's details.