Dog preventative care is anything that we do medically speaking that prevents disease. So the most common things would be vaccinations, heartworm preventatives, and perhaps flea control. It involves products that we can give or administer that will prevent disease down the road.

Well, for obvious reasons, if we’re preventing things like infectious diseases, for example, we give a rabies vaccination to prevent that dog from getting rabies. That’s pretty helpful. But also things like parvo, distemper, hepatitis—all the different ingredients in these combination vaccines. Heartworm disease, that’s huge. In South Louisiana where we practice, it’s rampant, really. So how do we prevent it? We prevent it by doing monthly heartworm prevention. And there’s only one way to do that.

There are always risks with vaccinations, let’s be honest. I mean, you’re putting a foreign substance into the body, whether it’s human, dog, cat, any of those things. There can be allergic reactions to those ingredients. So yes, there always is that possibility. The way I look at things like this is, does the potential benefit outweigh the potential risk? And I’m a big vaccine guy, so I don’t even have to think about it. I think that the benefit of those vaccines far, far, far outweighs the risk of a potential reaction or a side effect from those vaccines.

Bare minimum once a year but, more realistically, I think twice a year is probably a better schedule to fall into because it allows the dog … they grow so rapidly and change so rapidly, much more so than us. Seeing an animal on a twice-yearly basis will definitely give you a better chance to pick up on conditions as they emerge, and not once they’ve been there for six or nine months or even a year.

During your average preventative care appointment, it’s going to be a lot of the routines, so we’re going to test the dog for heartworms. We’re going to do a stool sample to look for intestinal worms. We do a great head-to-toe physical exam. We’re going to administer vaccinations to prevent all the diseases.

Also, it gives us an opportunity to do what we call wellness blood work. That is typically where we run a CBC and maybe a chemistry panel. On some of our older patients, we might also include a thyroid panel. But it’s before there’s a problem, so we’re looking to see if we can see the beginnings of perhaps inadequate kidney function, or the beginnings of something that’s affecting the liver, or electrolytes or blood sugar…those kinds of things. That’s why we call it wellness blood work. There’s no problem there at that time, but it’s allowing us to look behind the curtain and see if there’s anything more brewing under the surface.

Preventative medication used monthly, heartworm prevention in South Louisiana is my first, second, third, fourth, and fifth answer to that question. Heartworms, are rampant. They are spread by mosquitoes. Heartworm preventative is absolutely imperative if you have a dog, and this is true anywhere, but particularly anywhere in the southern half to two-thirds of the United States. It’s just everywhere. And it would be downright silly to not have them on heartworm preventatives.

Other things that may not be mandatory depending on where your dog lives and what their lifestyle is, but various flea and/or tick controls could also be considered monthly preventatives as well.

If you still have any other questions and you’d like to reach out to us, you can call us directly at (337) 223-9581, you can email us, or you can reach out on Facebook if you’d like. But please do reach out, we’ll try and get back to you as fast as we can.