You will be able to count resting breaths, build the baseline that belongs to your own animal, and tell ordinary panting apart from effort that cannot wait.
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Breathing is the one vital sign an owner can watch without touching anything. It still has to be watched at the right moment, and compared with the right thing.
Wait until it is asleep, in a room that is not overheated and away from any heat source. Watch the chest: one rise and one fall make one breath.
Count for a full minute with a clock in front of you. Fifteen seconds multiplied by four rarely does, because a sleeping animal does not breathe on a perfectly even beat.
A rate only means something next to the usual rate of the same animal in the same conditions. That is the figure almost nobody has to hand at the moment it is needed.
Take it tonight, while all is well, and write it down with the date. Do it again two or three times a year. You are not chasing an absolute value: you want to know how far it has moved from itself.
In dogs, panting is part of ordinary working order: it sheds heat, excitement, sometimes fear. In a resting cat, an open mouth serves no such purpose.
A cat breathing with its mouth open when it has not been playing, with no heat around it, is a same-day phone call. That does not say what is wrong. It says the phone comes before the search for explanations.
Quiet breathing moves the chest, and barely. Breathing that costs something pulls the belly in on every cycle, holds the elbows away from the body, stretches the neck forward.
Read the posture as much as the rate. An animal that will not lie on its side and stays sitting with its head held out is telling you something counting will not.
Heat, exercise, excitement, stress, pain: the same loud breathing covers all of it. So the first question is not how fast, but why now.
What deserves attention is panting with no visible cause, in a cool room, in an animal that cannot settle after several minutes of rest. How long it lasts counts for more than how loud it is.
Coughing, reverse sneezing, throat clearing, retching: over the phone these all sound like one another, and heard out loud they sound like nothing alike.
Film ten seconds with sound. A loud, short snatch of air that stops on its own has nothing to do with a cough that comes back in fits all night, and the video settles that in a second.
Keep the video even once the episode passes. It earns its place on appointment day, when the animal, as ever, is perfectly fine in the waiting room.
A flat-faced animal that snores, wheezes and sleeps sitting up has always done so, so nobody notices any more. A household's habits are not a measurement.
The question is not whether the noise is new to you, but whether it is growing: louder than six months ago, there at rest when it used to follow exercise, there at night when it used to belong to playtime.