You will be able to measure at home what the clinic cannot: what goes in, what comes out, and how to hold those three numbers in a household with several animals.
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A vet sees your animal for twenty minutes a year. You see its bowl, its tray and its garden every day, and that is where the earliest changes can be read.
Once a week, fill it from a measuring jug and write down the amount. The next day, pour what is left back into the same jug and write that down. The difference is what it drank, minus evaporation.
You are not chasing an absolute value; you want to compare this week with the same measurement taken in three months. Always do it the same way, same bowl, same room.
An animal drinking less worries everyone immediately. An animal drinking more passes for a healthy one, and the increase settles in over months without anyone putting a date on it.
Fountains and several bowls make counting impossible. For one week of measuring, go back to a single bowl and a single water point, then put everything back.
The same scoop does not hold the same mass depending on the shape of the biscuits, how they settle and whose hand fills it. Kitchen scales remove that variation in ten seconds a day.
The point is not precision for its own sake. It is being able to say down the phone that it eats the same as before, or clearly less, instead of having to guess.
Biscuits dropped on the floor, head tilted to one side, hesitating at the bowl and then coming back, eating noisily where it used to eat quietly: these details often belong to the mouth, and they come before any drop in quantity.
Watch it eat once a week, start to finish, doing nothing else. It is the easiest observation to fit into a day and the one most often skipped.
Number of clumps, size of clumps, long spells of straining, traces of blood, urine outside the tray: the tray hands you information every day that no consultation can manufacture.
A covered tray hides all of it. Take the lid off for a week if you have a doubt, and scoop at a fixed time so the count means something.
One soft stool in an animal eating and playing as usual is not an event. Three days running, or nothing at all for several days, is.
Note what changed around it: a new bag of food, table scraps, access to the bin, a walk somewhere new. The cause often sits in those four lines.
They conclude nothing. They build one precise sentence to say on the phone, and that is already far more than most calls contain.
In a household with several animals, every one of them is wrong until you know who drinks, who eats and who uses which tray. Separating the animals and the trays for a few days is a nuisance, and it is the only way to get a number that truly belongs to one of them.