Senior pets: what changes, and what should not be ignored

He is just getting old may be the most expensive sentence in veterinary medicine. Ageing is not a disease. Nearly everything we shrug off as ageing — the stiffness, the night pacing, the drinking, the fading — is a specific condition with a name, and a surprising number of them are treatable.

Roughly, dogs enter their senior years around seven, earlier for giant breeds and later for small ones; cats around ten or eleven. From that point, ask your vet about twice-yearly examinations. A year is a big slice of a senior's life, and blood, urine and blood pressure checks find things months before you would see them at home.

Four changes deserve an appointment this week, not at the next vaccination. First, drinking more. You can measure this: fill the water bowl with a known amount, give water nowhere else for twenty-four hours, and see what disappears. Any clear, sustained increase over your animal's own normal is worth a call; increased thirst is often the opening line of kidney disease, diabetes and several hormonal conditions, all far more manageable when caught early. Second, weight loss with a normal or hungry appetite. That combination is never just age; in older cats it very often points to an overactive thyroid, and it can also be diabetes or gut disease. Third, night waking, pacing, staring at walls, getting stuck behind furniture, forgetting a lifelong routine. It may be cognitive decline, but pain, high blood pressure and thyroid problems present exactly the same way, so do not settle on dementia in your own head. Fourth, avoiding stairs, hesitating before jumping onto the sofa, three attempts to lie down, stiffness for the first ten minutes after a nap, or no longer coming to the door to greet you. That is usually osteoarthritis, under-treated precisely because it looks like slowing down. Your vet has safe long-term options. Never give human painkillers — several common ones are lethal to dogs and cats.

Also worth a call: a lump that changes, blood in the urine, a cough lasting more than a week, or breathlessness that arrives sooner on the same walk than last month.

At home, small changes buy a lot of comfort. Traction is the biggest: put runners or rugs along the routes they actually use, because slick floors are why many arthritic dogs simply stop moving around the house. Keep the nails short — long nails change the angle of the foot and steal grip. Add a ramp or steps to the sofa, the bed and the car, and block the stairs they should not attempt alone. Give them a padded, draught-free bed; an orthopaedic mat costs less than an X-ray. For cats, put a litter box on every floor and cut one side down to about five to eight centimetres (two to three inches), because an arthritic cat that stops climbing into a high-sided box gets called spiteful when it is simply in pain. For failing sight, keep the furniture where it is and add a night light; for failing hearing, speak or thump the floor before you touch them, so you never startle them awake.

And keep them moving. Three short walks beat one long one; muscle is what supports an arthritic joint, and it disappears fast when a dog rests. Finally, keep a note on your phone of what changed and when — the date they stopped using the stairs, the week the drinking increased. Vets make far better decisions with data than with the memory of a worrying month.