Emergency clinic tonight or regular vet Monday for a limp that comes and goes Is This Urgent

Film him getting up from lying down, tonight and tomorrow. Limps have an infuriating habit of vanishing on the consulting room floor and a ten second video has saved me a second appointment more than once.

Worth naming the money part honestly, because it is clearly in the question: an out-of-hours visit for something that is stable and then reassessed on Monday anyway is a real cost for very little added information. But the phone triage is free, so there is no version of this where phoning is the wrong move.

Call the emergency line and describe it rather than deciding alone — they triage over the phone, it costs nothing, and they will often tell you honestly that Monday is fine. That call is the actual answer to this question.

For what the triage tends to hinge on: an intermittent hind limb lameness in a dog who is weight bearing, eating, and not crying is usually a Monday conversation. What makes it tonight is non-weight-bearing at all, a leg hanging at an odd angle, swelling, obvious pain when touched, a wound, or a dog who is panting, restless and cannot settle. Sudden severe pain with a hard belly is always tonight.

Until Monday I would keep him on lead in the garden, no stairs, no jumping onto furniture, and short toilet trips only. Nothing from your own medicine cupboard, ever — several common human painkillers are dangerous for dogs and the vet cannot easily work around them afterwards.

Also write down exactly what he was doing when it started, even if it seems trivial. Ours turned out to have gone off a low wall he goes off every day, and knowing the mechanism changed what they looked at first.