Tips On How To Organise Your Dog Emergency Information
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Does Fido need a Filofax? Is keeping track of his personal and emergency information becoming a trial? After all several pieces of paper with all his important numbers and records scattered throughout the length and breadth of your house is hardly efficient. Nor is the complete mess left by you as you trawl through drawers and filing cabinets looking for his vaccination records. What this situation requires is a bit of organisation!
Types of information
The best way to start organising any system of information is to actually work out what sort of information you need; what is the simplest way of accessing it, as well as who are people who will require to use it. Of course the most important information concerns veterinary and insurance details, but perhaps you want to keep a complete medical history, a list of medications and allergies. However, there may be other sorts of information that are not necessarily obvious: legal things such as what happens to your pet in the event of your death, in which case others might need access; or maybe more general information about common diseases, such as symptoms; what about things which might may be toxic for your dog, but not necessarily toxic for you.
Who is going to need the information?
Obviously the person who will be using this information the most will be you! So as long as you understand your system, and can access it quickly and easily, that will be fine. But suppose your family or friends need to access this information, or professionals from a boarding kennel. What ever system you develop has to be user friendly, and easy for multiple person admission.
Computer programs
Probably the simplest method would a filing cabinet or a series of index cards. However, in this age a paper free and space free option may be the answer. Also it would be less time consuming than endless filling out small cards by hand and then cross referencing. Most people who have access to a computer would probably opt for the data base solution. Using standard soft ware might also be just as time consuming as doing the whole thing in hard copy: devising databases can take a bit of time. Fortunately there are plenty of dedicated software products on the market to make your life, and that your dog, much easier. In the event of an emergency that is.
Conclusion
There is no doubt that it will be a lot of work setting up an information system for your dog. Equally, if a problem does occur, you will need that information pretty quickly. If you organise yourself now, then it will be a simple matter to maintain the information thereafter, and be prepared for the time when something does happen to your dog and you need to act quickly.
Friday, June 20th, 2008 at 1:03 pm and is filed under Dog training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
