Dog Intestinal Worms – 3 Things You Need to Know About Deworming

Intestinal worms are a fact of life for your dog – dogs and worms go together – and worms do not only influence the health of your dog, but the health of your family as well!

Deworming your dog is thus a vital step (although not the only one by any means!) in ensuring that both your dog and your family are not adversely affected by dog worms.

Unfortunately, even deworming a dog effectively is not as straight forward as most people assume it to be. The assumption that getting a dewormer pill down the dog’s throat will solve the intestinal worm problem can be dangerous because in many cases, it doesn’t! And that leaves both the dog and your family still at risk to the health debilitating effects of these worms.

So, before you deworm your dog, consider the following:

1) Not all dewormers are equally effective against all the different species of intestinal worms. This is particularly true of over the counter deworming remedies.

2) All dewormers are dose dependant. It is important to weigh your dog accurately and give the correct dosage of the dewormer for the type of worm you are treating for – and don’t be surprised if the same dewormer has different dose rates for different worm types (see point one again).

3) Consider that at least one part (usually more) of the worm’s lifecycle takes place outside of the body of the dog. So even when you treat the dog correctly, you are only treating part of the problem, as those parts of the lifecycle already outside the body of the dog will be unaffected by the treatment.

It should be obvious from the above that deworming your dog effectively is far more complicated than simply buying a deworming pill and ensuring that your dog swallows it.

By: Le Doc

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