The most important thing about fleas is that they're very hard to control. Once they get in your home, it's really bad. They come in three stages, and when an adult flea bites your dog or cat, it will lay somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 eggs a day. Those eggs turn into a form called the pupa, and they fall off of your dog or cat and go into your carpets and upholstery, and they're almost impossible to get rid of. You really have to use a professional to resolve fleas in your home.

Fleas and ticks are easily preventable with prescription products. There are no specific non-prescription products that I'm familiar with that work effectively. In fact, I've seen them all fail. There are many available to you, and all you have to do is talk to your veterinarian, and he'll definitely help you out.

Most of the diseases that come from fleas and ticks are treated with antibiotics and some with antiparasitic drugs. The bottom line is that, especially with fleas, they're so bad, but ticks here in Kansas transmit a lot of diseases. Prevention is much better than a cure.

There's a list of about eight that I'm familiar with, including anaplasmosis, ehrlichiosis, Lyme disease, rickettsioses, feline infectious anemia, borreliosis, and the list goes on. If you're really interested in specific diseases, you can always search that out, but the bottom line is that they come from fleas and ticks, and flea and tick prevention is really becoming very scientific, and prescription products are very effective.

The most important thing you can do is not let your senior dog get fat. When your dog is seen for annual visits by his veterinarian, the very first thing the veterinarian's going to do before he ever even touches your dog is doing a body score. He does that by touching your dog's ribs and feeling his waist in front of his hips and behind his ribcage. He will tell you what the dog's body score is from one to nine. Both four and five are normal body scores, and if you keep your dog in that normal range of four or five versus a six, we have scientific proof at this point that that will extend his life by a couple of years.