Animals – Parasite control

We often get asked how to control fleas, ticks and worms in cats and dogs. The simplest answer is to use effective products frequently. Yes, I can hear all the toddlers out there reply “but why?”. We have all taken that deep breath and considered providing the full story, but then think, ‘Will they have the patience or actually be willing to accept the shortened story?’.

When I remember the days, weeks, months and years studying parasitology where the mantra was “the first step to understanding is knowing how to spell the parasites name property”, my eyes have already glazed over. The short story is always the best story.

Young animals are the most affected by parasites and frequent parasite control is important for maintaining health. Most older animals can cope with parasites. Regular flea control for cats and dogs will break the flea’s lifecycle, preventing the adults laying the eggs of a future generation of fleas. This same idea applies to ticks, stomach and tape worms. However, decontaminating the environment is much harder for these later beasties.

Ticks can feed on anything with blood including mammals, reptiles, birds and amphibians. However, they need to have three blood feeds before they can produce eggs and while they may still get engorged on your pet, they will die afterwards. Hence, special spot-on or tablet products will both kill your pet’s fleas and aid in the control of ticks.

Stomach worms are normally host specific – cat worms will not infect dogs and vice versa. There are a few exceptions and generally only the very young or very old get infected with other animals’ stomach worms. We typically, we advise worming adults every three months.

Tape worms typically have a two-host life cycle with carnivores (meat eaters) being the definitive host in which the tape worms can reproduce. Herbivores are normally the intermediate host, becoming infected from eggs passed in carnivores’ faeces and they themselves infecting carnivores when they themselves are eaten. There is a tapeworm in cats which has fleas as the intermediate host, therefore, many cat flea products have an active ingredient call praziquantel which effectively kills adult tape worms.

Sheep are the intermediate host for a tapeworm called Cysticercus ovis, or sheep measles. Farmers of sheep often feed sheep meat or offal to their dogs. They have a special control programme whereby all farm dogs are treated for stomach worms every three months and tape worms every month. The latter with products containing praziquantel. They additionally freeze the sheep products for 10 days at -10˚ C to kill the intermediate stages of this tape worm. That is normally a chest deep freeze, which typically runs at a colder temperature.

Should your pet dog come into contact with sheep pasture, then it is a good idea to treat them with a product containing praziquantel either monthly or a week before going onto sheep pasture. This will help the sheep farmers control sheep measles on their properties and, hence, also help protect our overseas markets.