You will be able to weigh a cat or a dog without buying anything, read its body condition with your hand, and spot the one kind of weight change that deserves a phone call.
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Weight is the easiest measurement to take at home and the one most often taken badly. A single figure is worth nothing; a run of figures is worth a great deal.
Step on the scales and note the number. Pick the animal up, step on again, note the second number. The difference is its weight.
Scales sold for pets will not beat that as long as the animal fits in your arms. They only earn their place with a very small animal, where a few dozen grams matter and get lost in the gap between two adult readings. For everything else, the purchase adds nothing your own scales do not already give you.
A number on its own has nothing to be compared with. The same number taken every month, on the same scales, at the same time of day, becomes a line, and the line is what speaks.
Write the date beside the weight. Three lines in a phone note will do. On the day something changes, you will hold the one thing nobody can rebuild for you: the before.
Lay your hand flat on the flank, without pressing, and slide it along. Feeling the ribs under a thin covering is a sound body condition. Having to press to find them is something else. Feeling nothing at all is too.
Coat lies. A semi-long-haired cat can lose a lot without the outline shifting, and a thick-coated dog looks round when it is not. The hand goes where the eye is fooled.
Do this once a month, always the same way. It costs nothing and it sticks better than a number.
If nothing about the food has changed and the weight goes down, the fall itself is the information. It does not say what lies behind it, and no piece of writing can say that from a distance.
This one deserves a call rather than a wait. You will arrive with two dates and two numbers, which beats an impression.
You see it every day. That is precisely why the slow change will slip past you: the eye adjusts as it goes.
Photographs do not adjust. Open the phone gallery, find a picture from a year ago taken in the same room, and compare. Plenty of people discover there what they had been looking at without seeing.
Breed ranges give a breeder a rough order of magnitude, not a target for one individual. Two dogs of the same breed and age share neither frame nor muscle mass.
The reference that works is its own weight while all was well, adult and fit. Write it down once and it will serve for ten years.
A steady weight is not a certificate. Muscle leaving while fat settles in does not move the needle, and fluid building up can even push it up.
Scales are a sensor, not an opinion. They exist to raise a question, never to close one.