A single current weight tells a new veterinarian almost nothing. The same cat at the same weight can be stable, recovering, or halfway through a slide that only the earlier entries reveal, which is why changing practices is the moment the weight history itself needs care: transferred whole, confirmed received, and continued in the same form rather than restarted from one figure on a new file.
A list of weights, not a single number
Keep her weights as a dated running list, each entry taken the same way — same scales where you can, same conditions, carrier subtracted the same way at home — because a trend is only readable when the measurements are comparable. A gain that is really a heavier carrier, or a loss that is really a different scale, sends a new vet chasing a change that never happened. Note beside any unusual entry what explains it: illness, a diet change, a pregnancy, a winter indoors. Those small annotations are what turn a column of numbers into a history a clinician can use in a first appointment.
Making the transfer actually happen
Ask the old practice to send the full history, and be specific that you mean the record behind the summary — weights with their dates, not just the most recent one. Update the practice details in her records at the same time, so the old surgery's name and number stop travelling with her file and causing confusion at referrals. Then close the loop yourself: ask the new practice to confirm the history arrived and is attached to her file. Transfers fail quietly — sent to a wrong address, filed under a variant of her name — and the only version of events worth trusting is the new practice reading an entry back to you.
The first weighing at the new practice
Book the first visit as a handover, not an emergency introduction. Bring the dated list, point out the entries that matter — the high, the low, the direction of the last year — and ask for a fresh weighing taken on their scales so her record gains a current entry measured the new practice's way. Agree how often she will be weighed from here and what change, in either direction, should trigger a call between visits. That conversation sets the baseline both of you will judge future entries against, and it happens best while she is well and the stakes are low.
Kept in sequence inside KinsLe, the Pet Passport shows the new vet a trend line instead of a lone figure, and every future weighing slots in after the last.