What this page does

You describe what is wrong with your pet and add photos. You get four things back: how urgently a vet is needed, what the description and images show, what it might be, and what is missing for a clearer picture.

That last part is often the most useful. Questions like whether the animal is drinking, or whether its stools have changed, are the ones owners rarely think to check and the ones a vet asks first.

What the urgency levels mean

The assessment uses five levels, and the difference between them is how much time you have.

• Informational — nothing alarming, keep watching.
• Routine — worth a vet visit in the next few days.
• Urgent — best seen today.
• Emergency — go as soon as you can, this may deteriorate.
• Critical — life-threatening, go now.

Where information is thin, the level is deliberately raised. A tool that advises waiting when it is unsure is more dangerous than one that sends you to a vet unnecessarily.

When not to check anything and simply go

Some states make any assessment pointless because the timescale is minutes. If you see any of these, head for a clinic rather than opening this page.

• Laboured breathing, blue or grey gums or tongue
• Seizures, collapse, sudden loss of coordination
• Straining to urinate without producing anything, especially in male cats
• A hard, distended abdomen, or retching without bringing anything up
• Heavy bleeding, or trauma after a fall or road accident
• Suspected poisoning: chemicals, human medication, antifreeze, rodent bait
• Temperature above 40°C or below 37°C
• Labour continuing more than two hours without a birth

How to describe things well

What helps most is not detail about the symptom but a timeline. When you first noticed it, what came before, whether it is worsening or holding steady.

After that come the ordinary things: eating, drinking, toileting, activity level. These four are what a vet asks at the start of a consultation, and the answers narrow the possibilities faster than any description of the complaint itself.

Mention what seems irrelevant too: a change of food, a new cleaning product, visitors, a house move, another animal nearby. A fair share of states that look like illness turn out to be a response to a change in circumstances.

Which photos help

Shoot in daylight and without flash — flash shifts colour, and colour is often the sign itself. Skin and wounds need a close, focused frame; lameness and posture need the opposite, the whole animal and ideally moving.

Three images from different distances say more than three identical ones. If the eyes or gums are involved, take a separate close-up: mucous membrane colour is one of the fastest indicators there is.

What this cannot do

It cannot feel what only hands and instruments find: temperature, pulse, the abdomen under pressure, sounds in the chest. It has no blood work and no imaging. It does not know your animal's history unless you enter it.

So it does not diagnose, and could not. What it does is help you decide how urgently you need someone who can.

What happens to your data

Photos are resized in your browser and sent for analysis. They are not stored on this site. Your history lives in your browser's memory, so clearing it or opening the page on another device will leave it empty.

The analysis runs on a Google language model. On the free tier Google reserves the right to use requests to improve its products, which is worth knowing before sending photographs.

The pet profile

Filling it in is optional, but age and breed change a great deal. What is normal in an eight-week-old puppy is a warning sign in a ten-year-old dog. Breed sets predispositions: breathing is judged differently in flat-faced breeds, lameness differently in large ones.

The profile is stored only in your browser and is included in every subsequent check.