How does preventive care help my dog in all stages of life?

That's a great question. If you've had a puppy anytime in the recent past, you remember that we saw you a lot. That's because we want to see you first thing with your puppy, kind of establish who they are, how they are, and what they need. We also split up our vaccines over several visits. We’re seeing them relatively frequently with puppy preventative care to get them fully protected against everything and up-to-date.

As we get into the young adult years, we like to see your dog still at least once a year, just to make sure that they're maintaining okay, that we keep vaccinations up to date, and that no problems are developing that may not be apparent at home.

Then as dogs get into their older adult years, and even their senior years, we start to want to see them more frequently again. Dogs age more quickly than people do, which means that problems can arise much more rapidly. Seeing your older dog every six months can help us catch things early—things that you may overlook at home.

You’re a big part of prevention as well. Paying attention at any stage of life to changes in routine, changes in behavior or interaction, and certainly changes in water intake and output can all be indicators that something is going on.

Preventative care is critical to have, especially starting with young puppies. When they’re young, the good thing about heartworm prevention is that it treats intestinal parasites as well, which is very common with younger puppies. Then as they get older, it's vital to keep them from getting anything that might worsen other diseases, as well, such as parasites.

For puppies, you have flea, tick and heartworm preventions and vaccines preventing diseases. Similar preventions are used for adult dogs . You have preventative care of fleas, ticks and heartworms. You should be consistent on that and make sure their vaccines stay up to date whenever they're around other dogs at the dog park. In your senior dogs, you want to have preventative care by checking out some blood work levels and making sure that you're not having any issues regarding their organs as those can start to get some diseases over time.

We tend to focus on puppies. We touched a little bit on that. We think about vaccines and puppy diseases because their immunity is not fully developed or not as robust as it could be. The preventative for the middle stage of life could be to keep them agile and energetic, so they can live a full life. That can be by preventing parasites and feeding them proper nutrition so they're not overweight and their joints don't feel like an old dog's joints when they're only four years old. Later in life, not that old age is a disease, but things tend to hurt a little worse as we get older. We can be more susceptible to diseases as the immune system isn't as robust as we age. So think about all those stages.

Prevention is not just medical prevention. Prevention for puppies may crate training your puppy when you're gone so it doesn't eat things that could cause a blockage. As your pet ages, there are two ends of the spectrum, so take precautions so it doesn't hurt itself. Raise his food bowl, and put the carpet down so they don't slip. So there are lots of different aspects of preventive control. Along those lines that we haven't talked about is behavior. We talk a lot about client education. One reason that pets end up at a shelter is that they're unwanted due to a lot of behavioral issues. So we talk about that in the puppy stages, but if you come to us with a pet that's older, there's still hope, and there are still things that we can do to educate. At that point, it may not be preventative, but it may be something we can work on and do the hard work to prevent problems later.