How (and Why) to Film a Seizure for Your Vet

Start with a fact that surprises most owners. Your vet will almost never see the seizure. By the time you reach the practice it is over, and your dog is often back to looking perfectly normal in the waiting room. So the diagnosis frequently rests on memory, on a frightened few minutes recalled afterwards. And memory is a fragile thing to build a diagnosis on.

This is not a minor detail. The International Veterinary Epilepsy Task Force, the group whose consensus sets the standard for this field, describes diagnosis as having two fundamental steps: first, working out whether the events even are epileptic seizures rather than something that just looks similar, and second, finding the cause. They are explicit that a detailed, accurate history is "the foundation for investigation of the seizure patient" (De Risio et al., 2015). The bloods, the imaging, the choice of treatment are all built on top of an accurate account of what actually happened.

Which is why the same consensus makes a recommendation worth taking seriously, because it turns "film it" from a handy tip into formal best practice. In their words, the owner of a dog with seizures "should complete a standardised epilepsy questionnaire ... and obtain video-footage whenever possible" (De Risio et al., 2015). That footage helps clarify whether the event is an epileptic seizure or one of the many things that mimic one, and what type it is. The guidance is not suggesting you film if you fancy it. It is telling you that video is part of doing this properly.

Your description matters. It is the start of everything. But here is the thing nobody tells you: this is genuinely hard, and it is hard even for experts.

Think about what a seizure asks of you as a witness. It happens fast, often without warning, while you are flooded with fear. You are trying to remember whether the twitching started in the face or a leg, whether one side was affected more, whether your dog was aware of you or somewhere else entirely. Those are subtle observations to make in the calmest of circumstances, let alone while watching your dog collapse. The formal diagnostic criteria rest on "many subjective clinical observations or decisions based on the owner-derived history or video, or both, of an event, a process with low interobserver agreement" (James et al., 2017). Even when clinicians work from the same information they do not always reach the same conclusion.

How slippery is it? One study puts it in proportion. Researchers showed 100 videos of dogs and cats having paroxysmal events, the umbrella term for these sudden episodes, to veterinary neurology specialists and non-specialists, and asked each to judge what they saw. Even with the video in front of them, agreement on the most basic question, was this an epileptic seizure or not, was only fair: a kappa of 0.40, where 1.0 is perfect agreement and 0 is no better than chance (Packer et al., 2015).

Take the right lesson from that, because it cuts both ways. It does not mean classifying seizures is hopeless or your input worthless. It means that if trained specialists watching the same footage reach only fair agreement, a vague spoken description is on even shakier ground, which is precisely why the best possible video matters. You are not being asked to be a perfect witness, only to capture the evidence so the people whose job it is to interpret it have the clearest thing to work from.

That same study tells you not just that filming helps, but what to film. The researchers looked at which features clinicians agreed on most and least, and the pattern is a ready-made checklist (Packer et al., 2015).

Some things were relatively easy. Agreement on seizure type was moderate (kappa 0.44), and the dramatic whole-body collapse-and-paddle kind of seizure had the highest agreement of all (kappa 0.60). But the subtle features were hard. Focal seizures, affecting just part of the body, had the lowest agreement (kappa 0.31). Agreement was only fair for whether the animal was conscious and for autonomic signs such as salivating or wetting itself, and poor for the odd changes in behaviour (kappa 0.16). Which side of the body was affected was also among the less reliably agreed features (Packer et al., 2015).

So the things experts struggle to pin down are the focal signs, the level of awareness, and which side is involved. That is your filming brief, handed to you by the evidence, because those are exactly the things a fleeting memory loses:

• Get the onset if you can. What moved first, a leg, the face, one side? Seizures are classified largely by what they look like, into generalised, focal, and focal evolving to generalised types (Berendt et al., 2015), so how the event begins and spreads is what lets your vet classify it. It is also the part that is over quickest and remembered worst.
• Film the face and eyes. Twitching of the whiskers, lips or eyelids, a fixed or darting stare, chewing movements. These focal and orofacial signs are subtle and diagnostically rich.
• Get the whole body in frame. Step back so all four limbs and both sides are visible. Is one side worse? Because which side is affected is a low-agreement feature, a wide shot of the whole dog beats a close-up of one twitching leg.
• Show the level of awareness, if you can do it without leaning over your seizing pet. Conscious or not is one of the genuinely hard calls, and the camera sees it better than memory does.
• Don't stop when the jerking does. The recovery, the post-ictal phase, is part of the picture too. We cover what it means in the post-ictal phase; for filming, just keep rolling a while afterwards.
• Say the time aloud and keep the clip running. Narrate it: "it's started, it's just gone twenty past eight." Your phone timestamps the file, but a spoken note and an unbroken clip are what let your vet see how long the event truly lasted, and duration matters more than almost anything.

You will not get all of this every time, and please do not treat the list as a test you can fail. One clear clip of part of an event is enormously more useful than the best description.

Now the line I will not let you cross. Filming is always secondary to keeping your pet, and yourself, safe. Never put yourself between your dog and harm for a better shot, and never delay first aid to set up the camera. If your pet is near stairs, water, a road or something hard, dealing with that comes first, every time, and the phone waits. The footage is a bonus you collect once the situation is under control. Exactly what to do in those minutes lives in seizure first aid.

There is one situation where the camera goes away entirely. If a seizure runs past five minutes, or your pet has two or more in twenty-four hours, or they run together without your dog properly recovering in between, that is an emergency: ring your vet or the nearest emergency service and go now. You do not stay behind to film an emergency. A single short seizure with a normal recovery is frightening but is not, in itself, an emergency. Where that line sits and why is covered in status epilepticus and cluster seizures. When in doubt, your pet's safety wins and the recording loses.

The video does one job: it shows what the events actually are. Alongside it sits the written record, and the consensus guidance pairs the two deliberately, the questionnaire and the footage together (De Risio et al., 2015), because they answer different questions. The video tells your vet what kind of events these are. The diary tells them how often, how long, what might have triggered them, what medication was given or missed, and how the recovery went. Frequency in particular is the number your vet doses against over time, so it is the diary, not the film, that tracks whether treatment is working. I will not teach the diary here, because keeping a seizure diary does that properly, but the rhythm is simple: capture in the moment, log straight afterwards while it is fresh, bring both to your vet.

The Seizure Diary holds the timing, the details and the events in one place you can hand over. When you next have an appointment, or if you are referred to a neurologist, share the actual video file, not a description of it, and keep your clips somewhere you can find them again rather than buried in a camera roll of thousands of photos.

So here is where this leaves you, and it is a more hopeful place than it might feel right now. You are the one diagnostic instrument the vet cannot bring into the room: the only one who is there when it counts. A few seconds of steady footage, taken once your pet is safe, can do more to get your dog the right diagnosis and treatment than almost anything else you will be asked for. Keep your phone within reach, know what you are aiming to capture, and bring back the clearest possible picture of something your vet will otherwise never get to see.