You will know which questions to put in writing while your animal is still well, so you do not have to invent them on the night it is not.
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Nobody decides well in a rush, at three in the morning, over the phone. The criteria that hold are the ones written down months earlier, calmly.
The worst moment to think about the end is the moment it arrives. You are exhausted, frightened, clinging to a two-hour improvement. No decision made in that state resembles the one you would have made calmly.
Take a sheet of paper one evening while it sleeps at your feet. Write down what would, in your view, make its life hard enough that it no longer holds. Then put the sheet away. You may never read it again.
This is not morbid. It is the only way to give it a decision made by someone who loved it and could still think.
Every animal has two or three things that genuinely make its day. For one it is the morning walk, for another the minute you come home, for a cat the sunny window and the evening meal.
Write them down now, while you can still see them. When the question comes, the measure is simple: how many of those things are left, and does it still enjoy them.
That short list beats any elaborate chart, because it is its own and not that of an average animal.
The memory of a worried owner is a poor instrument. It keeps yesterday's good day and erases the four bad ones before it, because the good day felt like relief.
A calendar on the fridge is enough. One mark for a good day, another for a bad one, decided in two seconds each evening, with no commentary. After a month you are no longer arguing with an impression, you are looking at a page.
The turn never shows on a single day. It shows on the page.
An animal lives perfectly well on three legs, without sight, without hearing, with a body that no longer does what it used to. It does not live well with pain that is no longer controlled.
So the question is not how much it has lost, but whether what is left can be lived without hurting. A loss can be worked around. Uncontrolled pain cannot.
If the pain relief stops covering the whole day, that is not a small adjustment to raise at the next appointment. It is the centre of the conversation.
Appetite is the last thing owners hold on to, because it is visible and easy to check. Many animals eat until very late, including on days when everything else is hard.
The reverse is true too: an animal skips a meal for a passing reason with nothing serious behind it. Taken alone, appetite tells you little in either direction.
Watch the journey around the bowl instead: whether it gets up to come, whether it stays standing through the meal, whether it heads afterwards towards something it likes. That journey talks, the bowl does not.
Asking is it time puts a vet in a position nobody can hold: they do not live with the animal and they do not see the nights.
There are questions they can answer. Does what I am describing hurt. Can it still be relieved. If nothing changes, what do the coming weeks look like. Would you yourself wait, for an animal in this state.
Ask them in that order and write the answers down before leaving the room. Very little gets heard at moments like that.
Regrets are not symmetrical. People who decided a little early describe a gentle day and a doubt. People who waited describe one specific night they can still replay frame by frame.
That imbalance ought to weigh on the decision, and yet everything pushes the other way: hope, the diary, the idea that one more day is a gift. One more day is sometimes a gift you give yourself.
Nobody blames anyone for waiting. But if you reread your sheet of paper and it says the moment has come, it is probably right against you.