The Pet Daycare Emergency Intake Checklist (Owner's Side)

You drop your dog at daycare, sign a form on a clipboard, and drive to work. On that form is a box marked emergency contact, and most of us write one name, one number, and nothing else. It feels like paperwork, but it is the only set of instructions a stranger has for handling your specific animal when a kennel cough scare, a torn nail, a bloat episode, or a building alarm hands the front desk a decision nobody there is authorized to make. The gap is not that daycares fail to ask. They ask. The gap is that owners answer blank and generic, and a blank answer is worthless at the exact minute it matters.

This checklist is the owner’s side of that form: the exact emergency information a daycare or boarder needs to handle your pet when you are unreachable, plus the questions to ask about the facility’s own emergency plan so you know it has one before you hand over the leash. This is a companion to our dog walker emergency card checklist, which covers the caregiver who comes to your home. Here the animal is at their place, on their plan, and your job is to make the intake information good enough to act on and to confirm their plan is real.

Brand names mentioned below are trademarks of their respective owners; EmergencyPetPrep is not affiliated with or endorsed by any of them. We check published specs and cited guidance; we do not field-test the gear, and we say so plainly.

Why a Blank Intake Form Is the Gap Nobody Plans For

Think about who is holding your dog when something goes wrong at daycare. It is a staff member, often young, often managing a play group of a dozen dogs, who met your pet an hour ago. When an emergency hits mid-stay, that person hits a wall of things they do not know: which vet you use, whether your dog is on medication, whether it guards its food, whether they are even allowed to approve a vet visit on your behalf. Every one of those unknowns costs minutes, and the whole reason you left your dog in a staffed facility instead of alone was to buy those minutes back.

The American Kennel Club frames the daycare itself as part of your emergency network, advising owners to “Consider making arrangements with someone who can get to your dog when you can’t, such as a neighbor, dog walker, pet sitter, or local doggy daycare.” That only works in reverse if the facility can get to you, or make a call in your place, when you cannot be reached. The intake form is that reverse link. Filled in for real, it is a safety net. Left generic, it is a formality that gives everyone a false sense of coverage.

The rest of this page is two lists. First, the pet daycare intake information the facility needs from you. Second, the questions to ask them. Do both and the form stops being a clipboard ritual.

What the Facility Needs From You, Field by Field

Start with the information a stranger on shift can act on immediately. This is not your dog’s biography. It is a reference for a bad ten minutes.

• A primary and a backup emergency contact who will actually answer. Your number first. Then a second human, a partner, a neighbor, a family member, who staff can reach if you do not pick up. One name is how these plans quietly fail, because the one afternoon you are unreachable is the afternoon it matters. AVMA’s disaster guidance is explicit about keeping contact records with “24-hour contact numbers, if available.” Give the facility two people, not one, and confirm the backup knows they are on the form.
• Your regular vet and a separate 24-hour emergency vet. Two lines, two addresses. Your day vet may be closed, booked, or across town when the daycare needs a decision at 4 p.m. AVMA’s own records list names your veterinarian plus alternate vets for exactly this reason. Write the 24-hour clinic’s name, address, and number so staff are not searching for it one-handed while holding a hurt dog.
• ASPCA Animal Poison Control. The number is (888) 426-4435, available 24/7, 365 days a year. Daycares are full of things dogs should not eat, from another dog’s medication in a bag to xylitol gum dropped in a lobby. Put this line on the form so a staff member is not guessing what to do.
• Written authorization to treat, with a spending limit. This is the field almost every owner skips, and it is the one that delays care. Staff can see your vet’s number and still be stuck, because without a signed line they have no authority to call it in on your behalf. AVMA’s guidance for owners is to provide a caregiver “a letter signed by you that will release them from responsibility if a pet is injured during an evacuation.” Apply that to the daycare form: add a line authorizing the facility to seek emergency veterinary care when you cannot be reached, and name a written dollar limit you are comfortable committing before you must be consulted. A staff member who sees a signed cap acts. One who sees a blank stalls, and stalling is the risk.
• Medical conditions, current medications, and allergies. Not “he takes a pill.” The drug, the exact dose, the timing, and what it is for, updated whenever it changes. Note conditions that change how an emergency plays out, a seizure history, a heart condition, a collapsing trachea, and any drug or food allergies a treating vet must know. AVMA’s disaster records name medical records and medication instructions as core documents for precisely this handoff.
• Behavioral flags, stated plainly. This is the daycare-specific field, and it is about safety, not judgment. Tell staff if your dog guards food, toys, or its crate, if it is an escape artist that bolts gates or climbs fences, and about any dog or people reactivity. Add whether it tolerates being picked up, handled by a stranger, or muzzled if a vet visit requires it. A friendly dog in pain or panic behaves differently, and the person moving it during a fire alarm needs to know that before, not during.
• The feeding and medication schedule. When your dog eats, how much, whether meals are separated from other dogs, and the clock times any medication is due. For a boarding stay especially, a missed dose or a resource-guarding meltdown at a shared bowl is an avoidable emergency you can head off on the form.

Our free printable pet emergency wallet card builds most of these fields into a card sized to hand over, with slots for your contacts, your vet, medications, and your pet’s microchip number. Generate it once, and you have a clean copy to give any daycare or boarder instead of scrawling the same details on a new clipboard every time. On identification, AVMA is blunt that a microchip is not enough on its own: asked whether a chip replaces a collar tag, AVMA answers “Absolutely not”, because “nothing replaces a collar with up-to-date identification tags.” Send your dog in with a legible tag, and confirm your chip registration is current, so a dog that slips a gate is traceable to you and not to an old phone number.

Make the Card Survive the Building It Lives In

A daycare’s paper file does not live in a climate-controlled drawer. It lives in a busy front office near water bowls, muddy paws, and the occasional hose-down, and the copy you hand over is the copy staff grab in a hurry. Bare printer paper does not last there.

A self-sealing laminating pouch seals a copy of your pet’s emergency card without a machine most households do not own, and the listing we read describes the sealed result as waterproof, with a permanent cold-lamination seal. Laminate two: one clipped to the facility’s file, one in your own pet go-bag so a lost original is never the only version. This is a nice-to-have, not a purchase you need to make the plan work, and the real work here is free: filling the form in fully and asking the right questions. A laminated card just keeps the information legible past the first rainy drop-off.

While you are printing, generate a pet rescue alert sticker for your own front door and window. It does a different job, alerting first responders at your home that pets live inside, but it comes from the same habit this page is built on: putting the information a stranger needs where a stranger will find it, before the day you need them to act on it.

Now Turn It Around: Ask About Their Emergency Plan

You have handed the facility what it needs to handle your pet. The other half of a real safety net is confirming the facility can handle any pet, which means asking about its own fire and evacuation plan before you book. A boarding or daycare operator who has thought this through will have ready answers. A vague one is telling you something.

Ask these four:

• What is the fire and evacuation plan, and who is authorized to start it? You want to hear that a specific person on every shift can make the call to evacuate, so there is no hesitation about who is in charge when an alarm sounds.
• Which staff physically move the animals, and how? Moving a play group of loose dogs to an exit under stress is a real logistical problem. Ask how they do it and how many staff are trained for it. A facility that has drilled this can describe it; one that has not will improvise, which is the answer you were checking for.
• How are animals transported off-site? Pet Boarding & Daycare’s own emergency guidance asks operators plainly, “Do you have access to a van, enclosed trailer or RV?” If the plan requires moving your dog several miles, there has to be a vehicle for it, and it cannot be a rental scrambled for during a regional disaster.
• Where do the animals go if the building is unusable? Industry guidance urges facilities to arrange relationships with other pet care centers an hour or two away to house evacuated animals. Ask whether they have a named relocation site or a partner facility, and how they would notify owners which one your dog went to.

If the facility keeps its own emergency contact and vet records on each animal, ask how those travel during an evacuation, because a relocation is worthless if your dog arrives somewhere with no paperwork. This is also where the boarding daycare emergency contact you supplied earns its place: staff should be able to reach you, or your backup, from a copy that leaves the building with the dog.

Be Honest About the Limit: Their Plan Is Theirs to Run

Here is the line this page will not cross. You can supply flawless intake information and ask every right question, and you still do not run the facility’s emergency plan. Once your dog is inside, the staff execute their fire drill, their evacuation, their relocation, on their timeline and their judgment. Your only influence is on the front end: the quality of what you put on the form, and whether you chose a facility whose answers to the four questions above gave you confidence.

That is not a reason to skip either step. It is the reason to take both seriously. The one afternoon it matters, you will not be there to fill in a blank or clarify a dose. If a broader disaster is unfolding, your dog may end up in a system you do not control at all, which is why it helps to understand how pet-friendly disaster shelters work and what a co-located shelter requires at intake. The daycare form and the shelter cage card ask for the same things for the same reason: someone who does not know your animal has to make good decisions for it, fast, from what you wrote down.

Booking a boarding stay under an evacuation order is a harder version of the same handoff, because you are choosing a facility you may never have used, on a day it is fielding calls from everyone else in your county. Our emergency pet boarding checklist for an evacuation covers what a facility requires at intake in that scenario and how to confirm one quickly.

The Pet Daycare Emergency Intake Checklist

• Write a primary and a backup emergency contact, both with phone numbers, and confirm the backup knows they are listed
• List your regular vet and a separate 24-hour emergency vet, each with name, address, and number
• Add ASPCA Animal Poison Control, (888) 426-4435, to the form
• Add a signed line authorizing emergency vet care when you cannot be reached, with a written spending limit
• List medical conditions, current medications with exact doses and timing, and any allergies
• Note behavioral flags: resource guarding, escape-artist tendencies, dog or people reactivity, and handling or muzzle tolerance
• Write the feeding and medication schedule, including whether meals must be separated from other dogs
• Send your dog in with a legible ID tag and confirm the microchip registration is current
• Generate the base card with our printable pet emergency wallet card and laminate a copy to hand over
• Ask the facility: what is the fire and evacuation plan, and who is authorized to start it
• Ask which staff move the animals, how animals are transported off-site, and where they go if the building is unusable
• Confirm the facility can reach you or your backup, and that records travel with the dog during a relocation

Where to Go Next

This page is the daycare-and-boarding spoke of our broader multi-pet emergency planning hub. If the caregiver comes to your home instead of hosting your dog at theirs, the dog walker emergency card checklist covers the card contents, home access, and written authorization for that handoff. If you are handling an animal that is not legally yours to decide for, the foster pet emergency checklist walks through the rescue’s vet-care authority and a temporary ID tag. And if a regional evacuation is the scenario you are worried about, our explainer on whether pet-friendly disaster shelters exist covers what a shelter requires at intake and how to find your county’s plan before you need it.

Dig out the last daycare form you signed and fill in every field you left blank, then ask the facility the four questions about its own plan. It costs nothing and takes ten minutes. The form was always a safety net. It only works once you finish it.