Senior dog
A practical UK owner's guide to the 'good days and bad days' method for tracking a senior dog's quality of life. What to log, how often, and what to do with the data.
There's a phrase that comes up again and again in the conversations UK owners have about their older dogs. It's not "is my dog suffering?" — although that's underneath it. It's something quieter, gentler, more honest. "They've been having more bad days than good ones lately."
That phrase — good days and bad days — is the way most of us actually think about ageing in animals we love. Not in clinical scales. Not in vet appointments. In a running count, kept loosely in our heads, that we don't always know what to do with.
This guide is about making that count slightly less loose. Not a clinical assessment. Not a checklist that takes your evenings. A small, kind way to write down what you're already noticing, so when the time comes to make decisions or talk to your vet, you have something more solid than memory.
The "good days and bad days" approach is associated with veterinary palliative care and pet hospice work that's been growing in the UK over the last decade. It's promoted by Cloud9 Vets, Compassion Understood, and a number of UK home-vet services who work with families during the long arc of an older dog's decline.
The clinical version, the HHHHHMM scale (Hurt, Hunger, Hydration, Hygiene, Happiness, Mobility, More good than bad days), was developed by Dr Alice Villalobos and is widely used in vet practice. The good-days journal is the everyday version of the final "M" — more good than bad days — designed for owners to do at home, between appointments.
This is the part most owners get stuck on. There's no objectively correct answer. The aim is consistency in your own labelling over time, not perfect calibration against someone else's standard.
The rough cuts most owners settle into:
A good day doesn't mean a young-dog day. A 13-year-old Labrador on Librela who slept most of the afternoon, ate her dinner, wagged at her owner when called, and didn't show pain on her short evening walk has had a good day.
OK days are the most common. Most senior dogs in the middle of their decline have more OK days than either good or bad ones.
Bad days are not always emergency days. Sometimes a bad day is followed by a good week. Sometimes a bad day is the start of a slide. You don't know until you look back.
There are roughly three levels of how to do this. Pick the one you'll actually maintain.
A paper calendar, three coloured stickers (green / yellow / red), one sticker per day before bed. Anyone in the household can add a sticker. Whoever spent the most time with the dog that day decides.
This works. It works because it's visible — everyone in the house sees the pattern as it forms. It works because there's almost no friction.
The disadvantage: you can't easily share with your vet without taking a photo of a kitchen wall.
One entry per day. Date and a single letter (G / O / B). Optionally a sentence about what made it that.
The advantage over paper: you can email it to your vet before an appointment, or scroll back over months in seconds.
The disadvantage: easy to skip if you're tired. Easier to fall off than the kitchen wall version.
There are a handful of pet quality-of-life apps now. Ralph is the best-known free one for QoL tracking specifically. Some general pet-organisation apps like 11pets have a wellness log feature. Veterinary palliative care services often provide their own logs to clients.
The advantage: trends are visualised automatically, you can share with your vet, multi-user households can both contribute.
The disadvantage: they only work if your household actually uses them. Apps that only one person in a multi-person household uses end up reflecting one person's bias.
This is the part owners ask about most often. The log is not a verdict. It's a conversation starter.
Take a screenshot or print-out to your next appointment. Vets are increasingly grateful for this — it transforms the visit from "so how has she been?" to "she's been having about three bad days a week for the last six weeks, mostly around mobility, and her appetite's dropped on Wednesdays specifically." That kind of data is much more useful than "she's been OK I think."
Specifically, the patterns vets find most useful:
A shared log forces a conversation that's otherwise hard to have. "Mum, I think Daisy's not doing as well as we're telling ourselves." That sentence is much easier to say when there's a calendar showing six red stickers in the last fortnight.
Multi-person households often disagree on QoL — one person notices subtleties the other doesn't. The log makes that disagreement visible and resolvable.
When you're making the decision about whether to schedule a palliative consultation, or start serious end-of-life conversations, the question that helps most is: "For the last two weeks, has she had more good days than bad?"
That's the question Dr Villalobos suggested as the simplest summary of the HHHHHMM scale, and it remains the cleanest test in the senior phase.
A few honest reassurances.
"What if I'm being too negative?"
You probably aren't. Owners typically under-call bad days, not over. We tend to remember the moments of brightness disproportionately. If your gut says it's been a hard week, your gut is usually right.
"What if other people don't see what I see?"
That's common in multi-person households, and it's why a shared log is so useful. Different people genuinely see different things at different times. The log lets you compare honestly rather than argue.
"What if logging makes me feel worse?"
For most owners, the opposite is true. The unpressed worry — the background hum of is she OK? — is harder to live with than a clear pattern you can act on. The log replaces vague dread with specific information.
"What if I miss a day?"
Miss it. It's a hobby, not a clinical record. Three days a week is fine. Inconsistency is fine. The point is the rough shape over time.
There usually comes a point in a senior dog's life where the green stickers thin out and the yellow ones come up, and then the red ones come up more often than the green. It doesn't happen all at once, usually. It happens gradually, and the log shows it before your day-to-day memory does.
When that happens — when there are more red and yellow stickers than green for two consecutive weeks — that's the moment to book a senior wellness consultation with your vet specifically to talk about quality of life, not just pain management. Many UK vets now offer dedicated palliative consultations for exactly this conversation; you don't have to wait for an emergency or a crisis.
This isn't a recommendation to put your dog down. It's a recommendation to have the conversation with someone qualified to help you think it through.
For most owners, having that conversation when there's still some good in the dog's life — when the decision is about how to handle the rest of this chapter, not what to do in a crisis tomorrow — is the best version of a hard moment.
If your senior dog has developed evening confusion ("sundowning"), pacing, looking for things, getting lost in familiar rooms, or vocalising at night — log those too, in a separate column or note. Canine cognitive dysfunction is increasingly treatable in 2026 with combinations of dietary support, environmental routine, and (in some cases) medication. The log helps your vet decide whether to intervene clinically.
A dog can be cognitively declining but still having mostly good days physically, or the reverse. The good-days method captures the overall feel; for cognitive specifically, watch the daily 7pm–9pm window for changes.
Superkin is a household app for UK dog owners. One of the things it does is make the good-days method shared and effortless — your partner, your kids, your dog walker can all drop a one-tap log each day, and you get a weekly plan that surfaces patterns nobody on the team would have spotted alone.
You don't need an app for the good-days method. A wall calendar works perfectly. If you'd like the household version with vet-shareable summaries, join the waitlist.
Related guides:
Last updated 19 May 2026. This guide is general information about a self-management approach, not veterinary advice. For specific concerns about your senior dog's quality of life, please speak to your vet or a palliative veterinary service.
First version lands on the App Store and Google Play this summer.