Shelters treat every cat in their care against fleas and worms, and they write down what they did, yet that knowledge sits inside adoption paperwork that most owners file in a drawer on the first evening and rarely open again. Months later, when a vet asks when she was last treated, the drawer is far away and memory is vague. Adoption is the natural moment to lift those facts into the record you will actually maintain. The record itself is simple and stays the same throughout her life: for each type of prevention, what was given, the date it was given, and the next due date. Your task is transcription and honesty, not planning treatment.
Copying the Shelter's Facts Before the File Goes Away
Work through the adoption pack while it is still on the table, and create one entry per type of prevention. For flea treatment, write down what was given as the shelter recorded it, the date it was given, and the next due date if the shelter stated one. Do the same for worming as a separate entry, because the two rarely share dates and merging them into a single vague line about being up to date destroys exactly the detail a vet will ask for. Copy the shelter's wording faithfully rather than translating it into your own summary, since the practice that later reads the record can interpret a product record accurately but cannot recover detail from a paraphrase.
Ask the shelter directly if the pack is silent on any of the three facts for either type of prevention. Staff often hold treatment charts beyond what the printed pack includes, and a question asked during the adoption week can still be answered from their system. Once she has been home a while, that route closes, which is why this update belongs in the first days rather than on a someday list. Never let the transcription date blur into the treatment date itself; the record must keep clear which day something was given and which day you merely wrote it down.
Writing Gaps as Gaps, Never as Guesses
Real shelter paperwork sometimes arrives incomplete: a treatment given during a busy intake may show a product with no due date, or a due date whose matching given date was recorded on a chart that did not travel. Your record should show those gaps plainly, with unknown written where a fact is missing, rather than a plausible date invented to make the page look finished. An invented date is worse than a blank, because every later reader will trust it, and prevention decisions may be built on a day that never happened. A visible gap, by contrast, prompts the right conversation at her first checkup with your own vet, who can advise what the incomplete record means for her and what should happen next.
How long a treatment typically lasts is a question for her vet; the record's job is narrower, holding the facts of her actual history. If the shelter gave you verbal information that never appeared on paper, write it as reported by the shelter with the date you heard it, so a future reader can weigh it as report rather than documentation.
Making the Record Yours From the First Entry Onward
From adoption onward, every treatment she receives gets added in the same shape: what was given, the date it was given, and the next due date, recorded on the day rather than reconstructed later. The shelter's entries form the opening lines of a record that will grow with her, through house moves, changes of vet and stays away from home, and its value compounds precisely because the first facts were captured before they could be lost. Keep the record with her other key documents, and take it to her first checkup so the practice can see the shelter's facts in your own hand rather than buried in a mixed adoption pack. Pet Passport with KinsLe holds those transcribed entries as the start of her permanent treatment record, in the same three-part shape every future entry will follow.