Friday, May 2, 2008

Heartworm Preventative

We gave the boys their heartworm preventative today. I had been hoping to wait until Henry had gone a while without a grand-mal, but it is May already and we finally decided, even if the heartworm preventative does trigger a grand mal, we'd rather Henry have a grand-mal than have heartworms. If Henry can't handle the preventative, then he certainly can't handle actually having heartworms and the very dangerous treatment required to get rid of them!

Riley got Revolution, which takes care of fleas and ticks and everything.

Henry got Interceptor, which alot of people who have greyhounds with epilepsy like to use. It does not do anything for fleas and ticks though. We'll cross that bridge if that problem ever arises. I am hoping due to his very thin fur, fleas will not be interested in Henry.

Some heartworm preventatives are poisonous to greyhounds. Greyhounds have been known to die after 3 days of wearing a flea collar. You have to be very careful about this and find out which heartworm/flea/tick products are poisonous to greyhounds if you have a greyhound. It is because of their extreme low fat and they do not metabolize the same way other dogs do. It is a good idea to have a grey savvy vet if you have a greyhound in your family.

5 comments:

Stanislaw said...

My humans are trying a homemade flea/tick preventative that only uses natural organic oils and no chemicals or anything. Maybe you saw some recipes on the K9Nutrition group postings? If not, let me know and I can send it to you. Or check out Onibasu for the recipes.

And yes, heartworm treatment is a terrible thing. Big Pupi would know... We take the same pills as you, Henry!

Glad to hear you're feeling better!

Stanislaw

Emily said...

Hi Stanislaw!

It is very hard for our Mommy to keep up with all the K9 Nutrition postings. Could you link us to it?
Thanks!

Henry & Riley

Stanislaw said...

There are lots of recipes around, but this is the one that we're going with:

In a spray bottle put~

10 drops each of
-peppermint
-rose geranium
-sweet orange
-lemongrass
(make sure they're all the actual real essential oils)

Fill the rest of the bottle with distilled water and spray the pups all over, and DO NOT use on the cat. It doesn't last a full 30 days like Frontline and stuff, so if you're heading out for a hike or something I think you'd want to freshen up with another spray down. We haven't given it a test yet... although we hear it's a decent alternative it's not as foolproof as the chemical versions. It sounds like it would smell mighty nice though!

We got 1/2 ounces of oils from herbalremedies.com (I think that's where...). They may even have a pre-made preventative on there if I'm remembering correctly.

If you give it a try let us know what you think! We've got another few weeks of Frontline prevention before we give this a shot.

Stanislaw's Mom

Stanislaw said...

Big Pupi posted today about natural critter prevention. There's a bit more of a detailed recipe for the spray on the blog if you want to check it out.

Hope all is well!
Stanislaw

Emily said...

Thanks for the recipe! Heading over to read Big Pupi's blog entry right now...