How To Prevent Parasites In Your Pet – Simple Solutions

I’m going to be hitting on another topic we get a lot of questions about. Preventing parasites in my pet.

I’m Dr. Sean McPeck I’m the CEO and owner of Tier 1 Veterinary Medical Center. I’m going to hit both internal and external parasites.

In Alaska, we’re kind of spoiled. I used to work as a veterinarian down in Georgia for a while. When I was stationed there, I was working as a vet tech in Texas while I was doing my undergrad, and the amount of parasites that I saw there would baffle you compared to what we have up here.

Now, we are not completely free of parasites at all, especially, if your dog or cat is outside a lot. If they’re hunters, they’re getting into feces left by the wildlife. We have a pretty substantial amount of roundworms. We see that quite a bit, and that’s usually when you have your your dog or cat getting into wildlife.

We get tapeworm. Those are the cats that are the mousers rodents are notorious for carrying tapeworms, but also once in a while we’ll see little pockets of fleas here and there. Definitely, in the summertime is where we we see it. And I don’t know if it’s attributed to the tourist population with the RVs coming up, bringing up their pets, but that’s usually when we see fleas.

And so, in the summertime when people are asking me, I definitely recommend doing some type of a flea prevention. We’ll see lice year round. All of these are very easy to prevent, but it requires you to do it monthly.

External parasites again, people are like, “Well, my cats and only an indoor cat”. Okay, well then maybe you don’t need to worry about it that much. But sometimes in those colder temperatures, things move outside inside. And so we have seen, you know, indoor only pets getting lice and different external parasites. So there’s no right answer.

But again, very similar to vaccines, it’s that small investment to help prevent serious issues. There’s topicals that you can give both for deworming and for preventing mosquitoes, ticks, lice, fleas, etc. There’s oral tablets which will also do the same, but those also help to knock out some of the internal parasites too.

There’s so many different brands out there, I’m not going to even try to mention one. Talk to your veterinarian and see what they what they recommend.