Preventive Care

Prevention is the key to your pet’s long-term health, as well as minimizing the lifetime cost of care. Routine wellness exams, vaccinations, yearly lab work, deworming and fecal checks, as well as medications to prevent heartworm, fleas, ticks, and intestinal parasites are necessary to protect your pet. We offer the most current recommended preventive medication for fleas, ticks, and heartworms that can be easily refilled at our hospital or through our online pharmacy. We also carry natural alternatives to flea/tick products.

Puppy and Kitten Care

We recommend taking steps to prepare your pet for his or her first visit to avoid having a negative experience, even up to 1-2 weeks in advance of the first appointment.  Please visit our Fear Free webpage to read more about preparing your pet for it’s first visit.

Loving your pet, includes handling and preparing them to live a happy fearless life. Be sure to look in their ears often, roll them on their back, touch their feet, look at their nails, hold their toes; hug them and if they are small enough, pick them up.

At their first visit, they will receive a full checkup which includes a physical examination, checking a stool sample, along with discussing preventative care to help keep them healthy for many years to come.  Be prepared to discuss:

• Diet
• Housetraining
• Behavior
• When to Spay or Neuter
• Individualized vaccine protocol for your pet
• Microchipping
• Baseline lab work and how often to monitor

Download our Puppy Handbook here.

Download our Kitten Handbook here.

Preventive Care

Preventive care tailored to your pet’s age, lifestyle, risk factors and other elements can help prevent common diseases or detect them at an early and easily treatable stages, furthermore, offering your beloved pet an extended period of vitality and good health.

Immunizations are one of the best tools we have in preventive veterinary medicine. The key to using vaccines appropriately is to determine which diseases your pet may be at risk for and then vaccinate for those diseases and no more than necessary. Due to advances in veterinary immunology, diseases that were once relatively common and fatal to pets are now easily preventable.

Our balanced approach to vaccines is the best way to protect your pet from disease and minimize the risk of an adverse reaction to a vaccine.

Puppy/Kitten Schedule:  The schedule for puppies and kittens appears to be a little busy; however, it is very important that puppy and kitten visits, vaccines and deworming get done at the recommended intervals or they can be susceptible to dangerous diseases and parasites.

Starting when the puppy or kitten is 2 weeks of age, they need to be dewormed for the first time, then dewormed every 2 weeks until they are 10-12 weeks of age.  It is important to have their stool checked during their veterinary visits to allow for the correct choice of the dewormer.  When they are 6-8 weeks of age, they will get the first of their distemper/parvovirus vaccines.  These are repeated every 2-3 weeks until they are 16-18 weeks of age.

Rabies vaccines must be administered between the age of 3 and 4 months and a booster is given in one year, after which rabies is given every 3 years.

There are other vaccines such as: leptospirosis, lyme, bordetella, influenza and feline leukemia.  We will help you to decide when to give these vaccines based on their individual needs.  Most vaccines need at least one booster after the primary vaccine.

For adult dogs, distemper and rabies vaccines are typically given every 3 years.  For dogs an annual leptospirosis vaccine is needed and for cats an annual feline leukemia vaccine is given for at risk animals.

For adult dogs a 3-part tick disease and heartworm combination test or a single heartworm test is recommended annually as part of the wellness examination. We recommend this even if your dog is on preventative medication and is currently Lyme vaccinated, as there are some rare forms of tick-borne diseases that we cannot vaccinate for.

A fecal examination is also an integral part of the annual wellness program for all pets.

We offer the most current recommended preventive medication for fleas, ticks, and heartworms that can be easily refilled at our hospital or through our online pharmacy.  We also carry natural alternatives to flea/tick products.

Geriatric/Senior Care Is your pet over 40? Pets are considered to be in their senior years at about seven years of age and older.

By taking the time to learn more about the special needs of your senior aged pet, you’ve taken the first step toward providing the best care for your friend in its golden years. We’re proud of the special interest we take in geriatric medicine and care of chronic disease.

The best time to begin your pet’s senior care program is well before age-related conditions begin to set in.

• We recommend regular senior wellness exams, which should include specialized lab-work to detect the early signs of disease processes.  In addition to lab work, radiographs and ultrasound should be used to image the thorax and abdomen of senior pets.
• Dental care at this point in life becomes even more important. We recommend routine dental exams and cleanings for all pets, but especially for those in their senior years.
• Proper diet and weight loss/gain are also important issues to keep an eye on.

​When you bring your pet in for a senior wellness visit, your veterinarian will evaluate all of these things, and offer recommendations based on what they see.

Lab-Work

Just as us humans are encouraged to have routine lab-work run as we enter adulthood, our veterinary team recommends the same care for your pet. Since your pet is seen on average about 3 ½ to 7 “human” years* between each exam if (done every 6 to 12 months), having baseline laboratory values, such as a white blood cell count, liver enzymes, kidney values and thyroid levels, help your veterinarian monitor the aging and disease processes. This in turn allows our team to better prepare for preventative wellness for your furry family member.

Remember the Benjamin Franklin axiom that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” is as true today as it was when Franklin made the quote.