With the coming of spring brings sunshine flowers and bugs bugs bugs! The ones of concern for our pets are tick, flea, and mosquitoes. All of these parasites will be more of a challenge this year due to the mild temperatures of this winter.

Not only are they an unsightly creature that attaches itself to our pet, they also raise some health concerns as well.

Harmful concerns of ticks:

• Lymes disease for the dog or cat
• Lymes disease passed to owner when removing ticks
• severe anemia to the pet (ticks feed on pet’s blood)
• skin infection at tick’s attachment site

Prevention:

• monthly spot-ons for your dogs and cats
• limiting your pet's exposure to tick wooded areas
• checking your pet after a day of being outdoors

Fleas...

These hardy little bugs have not gone dormant for the last several winters, due to such mild winters. The fact that your pet bring fleas into your home on their fur allows fleas to reproduce all year round. This is due to our homes temperature never being too hot or too cold which allows fleas to reproduce continually at a very rapid rate.

Flea facts:

• Number of eggs- One flea can produce 2,000 eggs in its lifetime.
• Egg survival - 95% of flea stages are present in the environment rather than on the pet. These environmental stages can survive up to 365 days..
• Produce madly year-round - Fleas can reproduce indoors in many climates year-round.
• Jump how high? - 9 feet!

Prevention:

• Monthly spot-on for your dogs and cats
• treating your yard for fleas seasonly
• treating your home for fleas

Mosquito

As the number of human cases of West Nile continues to increase in this area so does the number of cases of heart worm disease in our dogs and even cats.

Prevention:

• monthly heartworm treatment for your dog
• annual heartworm testing
• monthly mosquito repellent for your dog