What a day’s entry needs to capture
Four lines are enough. Appetite: did he finish his feed and graze willingly? Mobility: did he walk out freely, lie down, and get up in one go? Mood: was he bright and interested, or dull and apart? Comfort: did he rest easy, or shift, paw and look unsettled? Behind each line keep the concrete detail that earned the score — ‘left half his hay’, ‘rose first try’, ‘stood alone by the gate’ — because months later, the words will mean something in a way a bare number never will. Choose a fixed moment for writing it — during the evening feed works well — so the entry is a habit attached to a chore you never skip, rather than a task you mean to do later.
Keep the scoring plain and consistent
Score each area the same way every day — a simple one-to-five, or green, amber and red — and resist upgrading the scale when it starts to feel crude; consistency is what makes the diary comparable across seasons. Score the day that happened, not the day you hoped for. Bad-weather honesty matters too: many old horses look worse in a wet, windy week, so note the weather alongside, and note feed changes, farrier visits and any adjustment your vet has suggested, because context is what separates a pattern from a coincidence. If more than one person cares for the horse, agree what each score means with an example, so a ‘three’ from the weekend helper matches a ‘three’ from you.
Patterns are what actually help the vet
A vet seeing a horse for twenty minutes sees a snapshot; your diary shows the film. It answers the questions quality-of-life decisions really turn on. How many good days in the last month, and is that number shrinking? How long does a bad day last now, and how fully does he bounce back? Do bad days follow anything — cold nights, a missed routine, the ground freezing hard? A horse can be perfectly manageable with bad days in the pattern if they are rare, brief and followed by real recovery; the diary is how you prove which pattern you actually have. The diary also protects you from your own worst day: decisions about an old friend are easily hijacked by the most recent frightening episode, and the written run of ordinary good days on either side of it keeps the judgement honest.
Preparing for the conversation itself
Before the appointment, read the last month through and summarise it in a few lines: the count of good and bad days, the trend, the worst recurring problem, and what you have already tried. Short phone videos of him rising after rest or walking to the field on a typical day support the words better than a description. Bring the diary itself; vets trust day-by-day, ordinary observations recorded at the time — including the unremarkable good days — far more than a summary written the night before from stressed memory.
Kept as a paper notebook, the diary lives in the tack room and never reaches the appointment. Stored in his Pet Passport on KinsLe, it sits with his other records and travels with him — so the vet weighing his quality of life reads the same day-by-day evidence you have been watching build.