A sitter who knows your dog well can fill small gaps from memory; a first-time feeder has no memory to fill gaps with at all. Everything you do without thinking, the right tub, the right scoop, the handful you hold back, has to exist on paper or it will be improvised. Write the spec in seven parts and keep the wording identical wherever you repeat it: the food itself, with the place it is kept; a measure stated exactly, in grams or by a scoop you name; the hours of both meals; the treats that are permitted; the foods that are off limits in your house; the way water is managed; and, set apart from everything else, the things that must never reach the bowl at all.
Which Food, Where It Lives, and How Much Exactly
Name the food plainly and say where it is kept: the dry food in the blue tub beside the back door is findable at six in the morning; food is in the kitchen is not. Then give the measure in a form that cannot stretch. Weight is the gold standard at home, so write it as a weight where you can: 140 grams of dry food at breakfast and 140 grams at tea, for example, is a real instruction a sitter can copy on kitchen scales. If you feed by scoop, name the scoop and its level: one level blue scoop, not heaped, using the scoop that lives in the tub. Never write a bowlful, a handful, or some biscuits, because three different people will serve three different meals from those words, and the dog gains or fades quietly across a fortnight.
Times, Treats, and the Water Bowl
Give clock times and the order of events around them: food after the morning walk at about 7.30, second meal at 5.30, nothing but water after that. Treats need the same precision. List which treats are allowed and how many across a day, perhaps two small training treats on a walk and one dental chew after tea, and list which foods are forbidden in this house even as occasional extras, such as fatty table scraps or anything cooked in rich sauce, if your dog's stomach or your vet's advice rules them out. Water is part of feeding, not an afterthought: say where the bowl lives, that it is rinsed and refilled with fresh water morning and evening, and that a half-empty bowl of yesterday's water is not topped up but replaced.
The Never List, Written as Its Own Line
Give the never list its own unmistakable line on the sheet, because it protects the dog when the sitter is offered advice by a well-meaning visitor. Grapes and raisins, chocolate, cooked bones, onions, and anything sweetened with xylitol can seriously harm dogs, and a first-time sitter may genuinely not know that a leftover grape is different from a leftover carrot. Add anything specific to your dog: a known sensitivity, a food your vet has told you to avoid, medication that must go with food and at which meal. Finish the sheet with what normal looks like, a dog who finishes both meals and asks for more, and what should trigger a call to you: a refused meal, repeated vomiting, or frantic grass eating. Walk the sitter through one feed in person if you possibly can, because ten minutes of watching beats a page of reading. KinsLe holds the finished spec where a sitter can open it on a phone, and the printable Pet Passport version carries those weighed amounts, feeding times, and the never list in full.