One pet is a handover. Two or more is a system — feeding order, who's allowed near whom, whose medication looks identical to whose. Most pet-care advice is written for a single animal, which means owners with a cat and a dog, or three of one species, end up guessing at what to add rather than following anything written for their situation.
The short answer
Cover each pet individually first, the same way you would if they were the only one — then add a separate layer for how they interact with each other, because that's the part single-pet advice never has to mention. Feeding order, supervision needs, and who gets walked or let out first are usually the details that actually determine whether a multi-pet stay goes smoothly.
Start with individual profiles, not a combined list
It's tempting to write one shared page — "they eat at 6pm, walk at 7am" — but pets in the same house rarely have identical needs. Give each pet their own section covering the basics: food, routine, medical details, quirks. A sitter juggling two or three animals needs to be able to find "the cat's information" or "the older dog's medication" without wading through a merged list built around whichever pet you thought of first.
Then cover how they interact
This is the part that's genuinely specific to multi-pet households and easy to leave out:
- Feeding order and separation. Does one pet eat faster and try to finish the other's bowl? Do they need to be fed in separate rooms, or is free feeding fine?
- Supervision needs. Are they fine unsupervised together, or does one need to be crated, separated, or watched during specific moments — mealtimes, new visitors, high-energy play?
- Whose turn it is. If both dogs get walked, do they go together or separately, and does one dog change how the other behaves on lead?
- Medication mix-ups. If more than one pet is on medication, especially similar-looking tablets, say clearly which pet gets which — this is one of the easier things to get wrong under pressure, and one of the more serious ones.
- The established pecking order. Which pet gets fed first, greeted first, or let outside first, if that matters to keeping the peace. Owners often don't realise how much of this is instinctive until a stranger doesn't know it.
Cats and dogs together
For mixed households specifically:
- Note whether the cat has an escape route from the dog (a baby gate, a high shelf, a room the dog can't access) and make sure the sitter knows to keep it clear
- Flag whether the dog is reliable around the cat unsupervised or needs active management, particularly around food and toys
- Mention if the cat's hiding spots are different when the dog's sitter is also in the house, since a new person plus an excitable dog is a bigger disruption than either alone
What tends to go wrong without this
A sitter without the interaction layer will treat multiple pets as separate, unrelated tasks — feed pet A, feed pet B, walk pet C — and miss the parts that only matter because they're together. That's how a food-guarding issue turns into a vet visit, or how a cat ends up cornered because nobody mentioned which room was meant to stay off-limits to the dog.
The debrief matters more here too
With multiple pets, more can quietly shift between stays — one pet's routine changes, a new pecking order develops, a previously fine pairing starts needing supervision. A quick check-in with your sitter after the stay (see our piece on the post-trip debrief) is worth doing for every multi-pet household, since there's simply more that could have changed than with a single pet.
Why Quirks & All handles this properly
A profile built for one pet and then duplicated for a second is how multi-pet handovers get messy — repeated information, no sense of how the two relate, no single place a sitter can see the whole household at once. Quirks & All keeps each pet's profile separate and complete, with the household-level detail — feeding order, supervision, who's allowed near whom — sitting alongside them, so a sitter looking after three animals sees one coherent picture instead of three disconnected lists.