Two minutes a day. It is the only health data your cat hands you without being asked.

Cats are very good at not looking ill. It is not stoicism and it is not stubbornness — it is what a small solitary predator is built to do. Looking weak is how you become someone else’s problem.

Which leaves you with a gap. By the time a cat is visibly unwell, it has usually been unwell for a while. But there is one place your cat reports in every single day, without being asked and without being able to hide it.

The most common serious disease of older cats is one you cannot see from across the room.

Cornell also notes that the only known risk factor for CKD in cats is age. There is no lifestyle to correct, no warning behaviour to spot. Which means the useful question is not “is my cat acting sick” — it is “has anything measurable changed.”

The three most common serious diseases of middle-aged and older cats open the same way. And they show up in the tray before they show up anywhere else.

A clump is a measurement. Non-clumping litter absorbs urine and lets it disperse, so volume leaves no trace. Clumping litter turns each urination into an object you can see, count and compare. What you are watching for is not one big clump — it is a change. Clumps that are steadily larger than they were a month ago, or more of them, means your cat is producing more urine than it used to. That is worth a phone call.

Four clumps. Their size and number are a record of how much your cat is drinking.

Stool is less precise but not less useful. International Cat Care lists the signs of constipation as: straining and difficulty passing faeces; digging around and spending extra time in the tray; crying out; passing faeces less often; and producing small, hard, dry faeces. International Cat Care

Constipation is common in older cats, and the cause is often mundane: arthritis. Getting in hurts, squatting hurts. The good news is that this one is fixable. A lower entry, a bigger tray, or a step in front of it.

Blood in urine does not always arrive as an obvious red patch. Often it is a faint pink tinge at the edge of a clump, or a rust-coloured shadow that is only visible for a few hours before it dries and darkens.

On dark or heavily coloured litter, that pink and that shadow are effectively gone. On pale mineral granules they survive. This is not a selling point, it is plain physics: you can only notice what the background lets you see.

Every piece of advice above depends on one thing you probably do not have: a baseline. “Bigger than usual” means nothing if you have never registered what usual is. It takes a week to fix that.

That is all of it. Most cats settle into a fairly steady number of urinations a day, and once you carry that number in your head, a change announces itself. This is not you diagnosing anything. It is you noticing sooner. If the number climbs and stays climbed, take it to your vet.

The point of noticing early is that most of the time, there is nothing to find.

One thing has to be said plainly: what you can do at home has a limit. Cornell states that blood creatinine does not generally rise until a cat has lost almost 75% of kidney function. By the time the standard blood test flags it, most of the damage is already done — which is exactly why they recommend regular veterinary monitoring for all senior cats rather than home observation. Cornell Feline Health Center

So this is not a substitute for a check-up, and nothing above is a diagnosis. What scooping gives you is timing. It tells you when to make the appointment — and with the diseases above, when is most of what matters.