What to Leave With Your Dog Sitter

By Jessica Ennis, DVM, CVA

Destinations · August 17, 2026 · 5 min read

The instructions that matter most are the ones you assume your sitter already knows.

Most owners leave a bag of kibble, a leash, and a “call if anything’s weird.” That last part is where the trouble starts.

I’ve had clients text me mid-trip because their sitter didn’t know the dog gets sick on the drive to the vet, or that the “good” bowl is actually the one that triggers reflux in a deep-chested dog. None of that is obvious to someone who didn’t raise the dog. It’s not that people forget to leave instructions — it’s that they leave the instructions they think matter, not the ones a stranger actually needs at 11 p.m. when the dog won’t eat.

The gap between what you know and what your sitter knows

You know your dog’s normal. You know that panting after dinner is just excitement, not distress, and that the limp on stairs shows up more on cold mornings. A sitter has none of that baseline. So the real job of a leave-behind packet isn’t logistics — it’s translating your dog’s normal into something a stranger can read in thirty seconds and act on correctly.

That’s a different document than most people write. A grocery-list version says “food in pantry, leash by door.” A useful version says what’s normal, what’s a red flag, and what to do about each. If you’re deciding between a boarding kennel and an in-home sitter in the first place, it’s worth reading Boarding Kennel vs Pet Sitter: Which Is Right for Your Dog? before you get to this stage, since the right instructions differ a bit by setting.

The core packet: what every sitter needs, no exceptions

Write this out, print or text it, and leave a copy somewhere obvious — the fridge, the counter by the leash hook, wherever the sitter will actually look.

1. Feeding specifics. Brand, amount, and timing — not “he eats twice a day,” but “3/4 cup at 7 a.m. and 6 p.m., in the metal bowl, no wet food mixed in.” Note any food-guarding behavior around other pets.
2. Medications, with the how, not just the what. Pill pockets versus straight into the mouth, timing relative to meals, and what a missed or vomited dose means for that specific medication.
3. Your veterinarian’s name, clinic address, and phone number, plus whether the clinic keeps weekend hours. AAHA recommends including this even when nothing seems likely to go wrong, because looking it up during an actual emergency costs time you don’t have.
4. The ASPCA Animal Poison Control number — (888) 426-4435 — written down, not assumed to be searchable. It’s staffed around the clock, and a sitter who finds your dog into something in the pantry shouldn’t be Googling under pressure.
5. Your travel itinerary and a second emergency contact — a neighbor, family member, or friend who can get to the house if you’re unreachable on a flight.

What people leave out, and why it bites them

Here’s the short version: the packet that causes problems isn’t missing the leash. It’s missing the behavioral footnote.

I once worked with a nine-year-old Cavalier King Charles Spaniel whose owners left every logistical detail correct — meds on the counter, vet’s card taped to the fridge — but never mentioned that she startled badly at the sound of the garbage truck and would hide under the bed for an hour afterward. The sitter, new to the dog, thought something was medically wrong and called an emergency line in a panic on day one. Nothing was wrong. The dog just needed her routine explained, not just her schedule. A single line — “she hides during loud trucks, this is normal, leave her be” — would have saved everyone the stress.

That’s the pattern I see most: the medical facts get written down, but the behavioral baseline doesn’t. Sitters aren’t undertrained; they’re under-briefed on what’s actually normal for this particular dog.

A practical sequence to build the packet

Do it in this order, a few days before you leave, not the morning of:

1. Write the feeding and medication schedule first, in exact terms, while you’re standing at the spot where you actually do it.
2. Add a one-paragraph “normal for this dog” section — noise sensitivities, quirks at mealtime, how they act when nervous versus sick.
3. Gather emergency numbers: vet, ASPCA Poison Control, a backup contact, and your own reachable number while traveling.
4. Do a short walkthrough with the sitter in person or by video call — show, don’t just tell, where things are kept.
5. Leave a printed or laminated copy in an obvious spot, and text a photo of it as backup.

If your dog is older or manages a chronic condition, the stakes on this list go up, and it’s worth a closer look at Should You Board a Senior Dog or Hire a Sitter? for how that changes the calculus. And if you’re weighing an in-home sitter against drop-in visits or daycare instead, In-Home Sitter vs Drop-In Visits vs Doggy Daycare: What Actually Fits Your Dog covers how much on-site presence your dog’s routine actually needs.

Where I land, and the trade-off I won’t pretend away

My position: write the behavioral baseline down, every time, even for a familiar sitter. The counterargument I hear most is that it’s overkill for a trusted neighbor who’s watched the dog before — and for a genuinely experienced, repeat sitter, a shorter refresher can be reasonable. But “watched the dog before” doesn’t mean they’ll remember which noise triggers hiding six months later, or that the dog gets carsick on winding roads. I’d rather a sitter skim past information they already know than miss the one line that would have kept them calm and correct in the moment.

The trade-off is real: a thorough packet takes twenty extra minutes to write, and it can feel like overkill when nothing ever goes wrong. Most trips, nothing does. But the packet isn’t there for the average trip — it’s there for the one where the dog acts strange and the sitter needs to tell, quickly, whether that’s normal or not. That’s the whole point of leaving it.

Before you head out the door, it’s also worth glancing at Is It Ever Safe to Leave a Dog Alone in the Car? What the Numbers Actually Say if any part of the sitter’s routine involves errands with your dog along — it’s a common gap in otherwise solid instructions.