Having a puppy is fun. It’s your small companion with whom you can spend free time, play and go for a walk. It brings a lot of joy and love to every family. But deciding on a new four-legged friend entails a huge responsibility, too. You need to devote it as much time and care as you can. It needs your affection, but also professional help when something is going wrong. Dogs and puppies similarly to humans may suffer from many conditions, including worms. It’s actually one the most common issues concerning pets, especially puppies, which are more prone to have them than adult dogs. Then, it’s the role of the owner to help them. So, anytime you observe worrying symptoms, such as pot-belly, weakness, diarrhoea, vomiting, belly pain, weight loss, or roundworms in their poop or vomit, then it’s time for your reaction.
Even if your puppy doesn’t have any of the signs described above, you can do many things to prevent them from having worms at all. To find out more on this topic, and feel more confident when it touches your pet, feel free to read the following article, which tries to explain to you the reasons for having worms, the best preventive methods, as well as the ultimate treatment for your bundle of joy.
Reasons for having worms
First of all, you should realise the source of your puppies’ worms. As My Sweet Puppy experts claim, puppies can have them from their mother that was infected already during the pregnancy and shared them with their offspring. Even if your puppy was lucky enough not to catch the worms from its parent, it could suck them out with the mother’s milk after birth.
Another reason for having worms is sniffing or eating infected faeces of other animals, found outside, in the neighbourhood. Then, they are likely to catch roundworms, which live in the intensities.
Moreover, puppies are highly exposed to fleas and other insects, such as mosquitos, which can infect your pet through biting. However, this time, they’ll suffer from heartworms, another type of worm found in the lung, heart, and blood vessels, which can lead to severe damages to these organs. These types of infections are much more dangerous, and in extreme cases, may cause even the death of your pet.
Preventive methods
Even though your puppy is healthy and you don’t suspect that it’s infected, better safe than sorry. So, the first thing you can do is to provide it with regular vet’s appointments, and check it in terms of worms a few times a year, when it’s a small puppy, and once a year, when it’s older. The vet should also deworm it for the first time when it’s young, ideally at the age of 2 or 3 weeks.
What’s more, keep clean your pet’s habitat, the place where it sleeps, eats, and spends most of the time. Always clean after it either in the yard or in the park. And don’t let it use playgrounds or sandboxes as their litter boxes. It’s highly insanitary, both for children who play there and for your puppies, which can catch some diseases.
Also, you can buy your puppy, a special flea-free collar or medicines applied to the dog’s skin since fleas are one of the causes of the worms. So, keeping it away from insects can be an effective preventive method.
Except for roundworms, you should also protect your fur friend from heartworms, which are carried by mosquitoes, and exist in the blood; hence they are more challenging to detect. For that purpose, ask the vet to prescribe your pet the right medication for heartworms, which usually also treats roundworms.
Since most worms can be easily transferred from dogs to people, and they are equally harmful to them, often wash hands after playing with your puppy. Also, don’t allow them to lick or kiss you and your kids. And most of all, don’t enter them into your bed at night. They have their own place to sleep. Otherwise, you may come across eye, heart, lung or neurological problems.
Deworming is the most effective treatment
However, if all these methods haven’t helped and your puppy is anyway infected, then you definitely need to see the vet. First, try to take the sample of your pet’s poop, which is necessary to take tests. The vet can also check it during the visit, and then examine the stool under the microscope, whether it contains worms or worm eggs. If so, then the proper treatment will be incorporated. Nowadays, many medicines can help your puppy. They are given to adult dogs as well but in higher doses.
That’s all you can do to your pet when it’s infected with some pests. Although the whole situation may be stressful at the beginning, keep calm so that you won’t stress your doggie additionally. It can be as frightened as you.
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