Pet Care Instructions for Your Partner: A Brisbane Parent’s Plan for the Dog, the Cat, and the Kids’ Guinea Pig

You’re a parent in Brisbane. Between school drop-off and the vet appointment you keep meaning to book, there’s a dog, a cat, and whatever the kids talked you into last Christmas. Your partner knows the basics — but not which flea treatment, not the vet’s after-hours number, not that the cat’s thyroid medication is in the second drawer down. If something happened to you tomorrow, your partner would manage. But “managing” while grieving, while also explaining to the kids, while also fielding the school — that’s where pets quietly fall through the cracks.

The problem

Pets are routinely surrendered to shelters after an owner’s death, hospitalisation, or sudden incapacity — not because no one loved them, but because no one had the care plan written down. ASIC’s MoneySmart guidance on wills and estate planning treats pets as personal property that passes through the estate, which means a will can name who receives a pet, but a will doesn’t tell anyone how to care for it. Wills are also slow. Probate in Queensland routinely takes months. Your partner doesn’t have months to work out whether the dog needs a half tablet or a whole one.

The gap is operational, not legal. Your partner needs to know, on day one: which animal eats what, who the vet is, which medications are current, where the pet insurance policy lives, and — for the kids’ sake — what the routine is meant to look like.

What the Digital Legacy Vault does

The Digital Legacy Vault is an asset-instruction register: you record what you own (or in this case, who lives with you), where the relevant contacts and documents are, and who you’ve nominated to receive the instructions. The simplified version (built for individuals and families) records, per animal: species and name, daily food and routine, medications and dosages, the vet’s name and contact number, microchip number, pet insurance policy reference, and any intended longer-term carer if both parents are unavailable — with that carer’s consent recorded in the vault.

The vault does NOT hold credentials, banking access, or the pet insurance login. It holds the instructions: what exists, where it’s found, who’s been asked. That boundary is what keeps the Digital Legacy Vault outside the AFSL regime and outside AUSTRAC reporting obligations — it’s an instructions register, not a financial product or custody service.

How it works

  1. You add each animal to your vault — name, species, vet details, medications, daily routine, microchip, insurance policy reference.
  2. You name your partner as the recipient for the pets module. If you’ve also asked a sibling or friend to be a backup carer should both parents be unavailable, you record their name and the vault prompts them to confirm consent.
  3. You record the location of physical documents — vaccination records, council registration, insurance paperwork — so your partner doesn’t have to search.
  4. If something happens, your partner is notified per your release rules and sees the pets module immediately. Other modules stay sealed unless you’ve released them too.
  5. Your partner has the vet’s number, the medication schedule, and the carer’s name in front of them — within minutes, not weeks.

Why this matters in Brisbane

Brisbane households often run on shared parenting logistics that are tightly choreographed and lightly documented — one parent does the vet runs, the other does the school runs, and the system works until it doesn’t. Queensland also has specific local layers: Brisbane City Council pet registration, the RSPCA Queensland Animal Care Campus at Wacol as the default surrender point, and a network of suburban vet clinics that hold partial records but no single source of truth. When a parent is suddenly unavailable, the surviving partner is the only person with the full picture — except they don’t have the full picture, because half of it lived in your head. A written instruction module closes that gap before it becomes a shelter intake form.

Sources

Join the waitlist

Join the waitlist — first access when the Digital Legacy Vault opens for Brisbane parents

We’re opening waitlist access in tranches. Sign up to be notified when parents in Brisbane can register their first pets module. The Digital Legacy Vault holds instructions about what your animals need and who has agreed to help — not credentials, not custody, and not advice on what to do with the estate.