cANINE cARE
Why does your dog need to visit the veterinarian if they are well? To help them stay that way!! Wellness exams are very important in maintaining your dog or cat’s health. Below we will go through a few things that will be addressed at your dog’s next wellness visit.
Vaccines
Vaccines help the immune system fight viruses (and some bacteria) more effectively. Depending on the pathogen, this immune boost means not getting illness at all, or it can mean the illness is not as long or as severe as it is for a pet that is unvaccinated. In a wellness exam we can discuss any questions you have about your dog’s vaccine program. Go to our vaccine page to see what diseases each vaccine protects your pet from. |
Deworming
Though an unpleasant topic, worming your dog is very important for his health as well as those people around him. We recommend routine monthly deworming with annual fecal tests. A pet can have intestinal parasites without anything obvious to the naked eye showing up in the stool. Those intestinal parasites can deprive your dog of some of his nutrients from his diet, spread worms to people and other animals and if he gets enough of them make him feel very ill and have gastrointestinal upset. Fecal tests look for microscopic eggs that adult intestinal worms shed to detect infection. The fecal test makes sure our worming strategy for your dog is being effective and looks for additional intestinal parasites including coccidia and giardia, two single celled parasites that can cause diarrhea. |
Fleas
Fleas are a fact of life. If you have dogs or cats you are at risk of fleas. They like warm, humid weather the most (they can reproduce fastest in that weather) but once in sheltered areas such as your nice cozy home, they can happily thrive in all seasons. Because it only takes one female flea to start an infestation, indoor only pets can become victims when their own owners accidentally carry a flea into the home from the outdoors. If your pet is itchy, discuss with us during the exam so we can help sort out if fleas are possibly a cause. |
Ticks
Ticks are active any time it's warmer than 40 degrees Fahrenheit, which means they can be out even on mild days in winter. They like to be in shady, moist, areas with lots of foliage. This includes rather tall grass, or woodlands with trees and bushes. If your pet is going to visit such areas, use tick preventative. And even with protection, check your dog or cat after their outdoor adventures for ticks, especially around their face, neck, and ears. If you have any questions about choosing tick preventatives, we can help you during an office visit. It is important making informed choices for prevention, as some products made for dogs are dangerous to cats. |
Heartworm
The other internal parasite that is commonly addressed in our canine wellness exams is heartworm disease. This worm truly lives in your dog’s cardiovascular system, though they are mostly within the large pulmonary blood vessels of the lungs instead of the heart. It starts out as a microscopic worm that is carried by a mosquito that had bitten an infected dog, and will live in the smaller blood vessels until it's ready to become an adult. That is when it attaches to the pulmonary vessels and grows. And it grows! The adult worms can be about a foot long! We test dogs yearly during their wellness exam for heartworm disease along with some tick borne diseases. Heartworm preventatives work by killing the heartworms when they are still the tiny worms in the small blood vessels and at your exam you can discuss which preventative is right for your dog. |
Nutrition
We know that the topic of nutrition for our dogs is important to our clients. We believe in food contributing a big part of your dogs well being. If you have any questions about how to chose a diet, or how much to feed your dog, we are happy to discuss it with you in our exam. We recommend avoiding food fads, and picking foods scientifically balanced from experienced companies with veterinary nutritionists on staff. If there are health issues we are going over during exams we may discuss Royal Canin Veterinary Formulas. These are prescription foods for pets that need more than a regular diet. These prescription diets are really food for medicine, as they go through clinical trials to prove they help the illnesses they are labeled for. |
Geriatric Exams/Blood Screens
As your pet gets older, there will be more and more things to discuss, go over, and recheck in our wellness exams. You can expect them to take more time than they used to, their health issues might mean they need to come in more often, instead of yearly, exams could be every 3-6 months. Geriatric blood screens help contribute important information to your elderly pet’s exam. They can highlight health issues difficult to discern on physical exam alone. Some of these issues are, poor kidney function, poor liver health and function, diabetes, anemia, systemic infection, and some hormonal problems. |