Sickness spreads. Here's how to stop it before it reaches the whole board.
Don't wait
What the vet is for
The vet is where sick dogs go to be isolated and cured. It has three beds.
A sick dog in a bed can't infect anyone else on the meadow, and can be treated for
40 🪙 (medicine) or 100 🪙 (surgery).
Sickness is the most disruptive condition in the game, because it's the only one that
spreads. A hungry dog stays hungry. A sick dog makes other dogs sick.
Sick dogs can't do anything. They can't merge, breed, join a pack, be
delivered to Court, or be sold at the Market. One untreated sick dog can stall your whole
board and every income source at once.
Wolves get sick too. The Wolf lineage — Wolf Cub, Grey Wolf, Timber Wolf,
and every wolf up the line — is not immune to illness. It's only immune to taming
and grooming. A sick wolf behaves like a sick dog: it shows the 🤒 icon, it spreads sickness
to its neighbours, and it can be sent to the Vet and cured for the usual 40 🪙. Wolfdogs
(both lineages) get sick as well.
Sickness only exists from Player Level 5 onward. At Player Levels 1–4 the
sickness roll is 0, so you'll never see a sick dog before the Vet tab unlocks. If you're
at Level 1 and reading this page thinking "which dog do I send first?" — the answer is:
none yet. Nothing can get sick until Level 5.
📊 How sickness spreads
The chance of spreading depends on your Player Level. Sickness doesn't exist below Level 5
— the spread rate is 0% through Levels 1–4. From Level 5 onward, the per-neighbour-per-tick
contagion rate is:
Player Level
Spread chance per neighbor per tick
1–4
0% — sickness can't occur
5
5%
6
8%
7
10%
8–9
12%
10–11
15% (cap)
A tick is the game's background heartbeat. You don't see it, but every ~12 seconds
the game rolls the dice on every sick dog's four neighbors.
The same tick does two more things. It also rolls wolf agitation (any wolf
has a chance to make its neighbours aggressive) and it resolves any fights between aggressive
dogs. So a sick dog on a board that also has a wolf is doubly bad news — you might be dealing
with both spread and fights at once.
🩺 How to cure a dog
Open the 🏥 Vet tab. (Or tap a sick dog on the meadow and press
🏥 Send to Vet on its action panel — same result, one less tap.)
Sick dogs on the meadow are listed at the bottom. Tap one to send it to a bed.
Tap the bed the dog is in to select it.
Pick a treatment: 💊 Medicine (40 🪙) or 💉 Surgery (100 🪙).
The dog is cured and returns to the meadow automatically, if there's an empty cell.
If the meadow is full, it goes to Kennel storage instead.
Action
Cost
Result
Send to Vet
Free
Isolates the dog. Prevents spread.
💊 Medicine
40 🪙
Cures the dog. Returns to meadow (or Kennel if meadow is full).
💉 Surgery
100 🪙
Cures the dog and one of: +1 level (if below cap), a random trait (if at cap with no trait), or a trait re-roll (if at cap with a trait).
🌿 Discharge
Free
Dog returns still sick.
Medicine vs Surgery
Medicine is the "just cure it" option. It's what you'll use most of the time.
Surgery costs 60 🪙 more and does one extra thing depending on the dog's
state:
Below your merge cap → the dog goes up one level (a free level-up).
Compare to merging: a merge costs you a whole second dog. Surgery costs 60 🪙 extra
and only one dog.
At your merge cap, no trait → the dog gains a random trait. Useful
for filling out the "unique focus traits" Player Level requirements.
At your merge cap, has a trait → the dog's trait is re-rolled to a
random one. This may overwrite a trait you specifically bred for. Only do this
if you want a different trait.
Surgery pays for itself when…
The sick dog is below your merge cap and you'd have to merge it up anyway — surgery saves you a dog.
The sick dog is a keeper with no trait, and you want to give it one for the Player Level gates.
The sick dog has a bad trait and you want to gamble on a better one.
Skip surgery if the dog is about to be delivered, merged away, or sold —
the level-up benefit leaves with the dog.
Discharging without curing puts the dog back on the meadow still contagious.
Only do this if the Vet is full and you need the bed for a sicker dog — and only if you
can afford to cure the discharged one immediately afterward.
If the meadow is full, a cured dog moves to Kennel storage instead. That's
not a loss — stored dogs are safe, count toward level unlock, and can be pulled back out
any time. But it does mean the Vet isn't a way to "make room" on a full board.
📜 The real history
Veterinary medicine is much older than most people assume — but the first modern
veterinary school was founded in Lyon in 1761, by a Frenchman named
Claude Bourgelat. Before that, animal care was mostly the work of farriers,
shepherds and farmers rather than a trained profession.
Dog medicine in particular lagged behind horse medicine for a long time, because horses were
economically essential and dogs often weren't. The first dedicated small-animal practices
appeared in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, alongside the same Victorian pet-keeping
boom that standardized breeds.
Kennel Keeper's note
The most famous rescue dogs in history are the Saint Bernards of the Great
St Bernard Hospice, bred by monks on the Swiss-Italian border from the 17th century. They're
credited with saving travellers caught in avalanches for centuries — and the hospice's own
records name a dog called Barry, said to have saved around 40 people between
1800 and 1814. The image of a Saint Bernard with a brandy barrel around its neck is a later
invention, though the rescue work was real.
🎯 Practical tips
Check the Vet tab badge every time you open the game. If it's purple,
there's a dog in a bed.
Isolate before you do anything else. One sick dog left in the middle of a
busy meadow can infect four more in a few ticks.
Don't leave a sick dog in a corner and forget it. It doesn't cure
itself, and it can't merge, breed, be delivered, or be sold while it's sick.
Keep two cells free. A cured dog returns to the meadow automatically —
but only if there's a slot for it. Otherwise it goes to Kennel storage.
Sickness spreads diagonally? No. Only the four side-adjacent cells.
A sick wolf is a double problem. Wolves aren't immune to illness, and
they also agitate their neighbours. A sick wolf on the meadow spreads sickness and
raises the aggression risk in the same tick. Get it to the kennel the moment it's healthy
enough to store.
Wolfdogs get sick in both lineages. Whether the Wolfdog inherited wolf
lineage or dog lineage, it's a full patient — sick, curable, and spreading like everything
else.
Consider Surgery on a valuable dog. If a sick dog is below your merge
cap, surgery is only 60 🪙 more than medicine and saves you a whole dog worth of merging.
If it's a keeper with no trait, it's a cheap way to fill the "unique focus traits" gates
at Levels 9 and 10.
Don't re-roll a trait you've bred for. Surgery on an at-cap dog with
a trait replaces that trait with a random one. If you've carefully bred a Lv 6 Bloodhound
with Keen Nose for the Smell pack, surgery could overwrite it. Use medicine instead.
