Health and Wellness
Let Us Maintain Your Furry Friend’s Pet Health
As part of your family, your pet should be given the same quality of medical care as any other family member. And to ensure that you can offer your pet such care, Durham Veterinary Clinic offers a wide variety of services for pet wellness and pet health.
Some of our health and wellness services include the following:
VACCINATIONS
Adult Pets
Keeping your pet healthy involves keeping their vaccines up to date. However, we don’t believe in over-vaccinating our patients, so we will discuss your pet’s lifestyle and discuss their risk assessment with you. Afterwards, we will use all the information at our disposal to tailor your pet’s vaccine protocol accordingly. We use vaccines that have extended immunity duration so that your pet is protected against a disease for longer periods of time, with fewer injections.
Regardless of the protocol, however, we do strongly recommend that your canine companion routine vaccinations against the following diseases:
If you have a cat, you’ll want to ensure that your feline friend is routinely vaccinate against the following diseases:
*Only cats that are considered to be at risk for this disease need to consider this vaccination.
Young Pets
If you happen to be the proud new owner of a puppy or kitten, you may feel like vaccinations aren’t a great concern. While puppies and kittens do receive protection against infectious diseases from their mother’s milk, this protection only lasts for a few weeks. Once this protection is gone, your new family member will be vulnerable to all sorts of diseases, so you should vaccinate them at an early age.
Most puppies and kittens will have already received their first vaccinations before being adopted. However, it is never a bad idea to double-check with their former owner first.
If you discover that your puppy or kitten hasn’t been vaccinated yet, we urge you to consider getting them vaccinated as soon as possible.
Worried about when exactly your new puppy or kitten needs to be vaccinated? Just follow this easy guideline:
DENTISTRY
Your pet’s oral health is very important. If left untreated, your pet’s mouth can become very painful and full of bacteria. The bacteria in the mouth can travel to the liver, kidneys, and heart and cause damage. To prevent this damage and maintain your pet’s overall health, at Durham Veterinary Clinic, we recommend routine dental cleaning. Dental cleanings involve placing your pet under general anaesthesia.
While under anaesthesia, a registered veterinary technician will be with your pet monitoring them the entire time. The technician will ensure your pet is on IV fluids and has their blood pressure monitored. Throughout this time, pain medication will be administered, and antibiotics will be given if needed. Then, we’ll scale and polish your pet’s teeth above and below the gum line.
If we find loose, unhealthy, or abscessed teeth, Dr. McCleary will perform oral surgery.
Once all of this work is complete, your pet will go home with any necessary antibiotics and pain medication.
Depending on the dental work your pet requires, the cost of our dental cleanings varies. So, please call our clinic to book an oral assessment for your pet so that we can give you a treatment plan and book your pet in for a dental cleaning.
Preventative Dental Care
To help ensure that your pet doesn’t encounter as many dental issues, Durham Veterinary Clinic encourages you to provide the following dental benefits at home:
A DENTAL-HEALTHY DIET
Feed your pet a diet that is designed to help remove plaque prior to it forming into calculus on the teeth.
REGULAR TEETH BRUSHING
Brush your pet’s teeth regularly to prevent further tartar accumulation on the teeth. Doing this daily is the best way to prevent tartar, but it would still be beneficial to brush your pet’s teeth at least three times a week
DENTAL CHEWS
Visit Durham Veterinary Clinic; we have several different dental chews for your pet that can help prevent plaque forming on your pet’s teeth.
Dealing with Periodontal Disease
If you’ve noticed that your pet has any of the following symptoms, your pet likely has periodontal disease:
Periodontal disease is quite a common dental condition in both adult dogs and cats. The disease occurs when bacteria on your pet’s teeth form plaque. If that plaque isn’t removed regularly, minerals in your pet’s saliva harden the plaque into dental calculus (brown tartar), which enables bacteria to start moving under your pet’s gums and negatively affect your pet’s health.
To avoid this troublesome dental issue, make an appointment with Durham Veterinary Clinic. We can help you and your pet deal with or prevent the effects of periodontal disease.
RADIOLOGY (X-RAYS)
To help the staff at Durham Veterinary Clinic assess your pet’s medical problem, we may use digital radiographs. As a diagnostic tool, radiographs provide critical information about your pet, including the following:
TICK AND FLEA CONTROL
Did you know that ticks are active and looking to feed in weather as cold as four degrees? In Clarington, ticks are a problem 12 months a year. It may not be all 365 days per year, but due to our climate change, every month of the year, there are days above four degrees. And because of this, the tick population is capable of exploding exponentially. Fleas are always a persistent problem. That’s why it is very important that your pet is on tick and flea prevention all year long.
At Durham Veterinary Clinic, we have different options for tick and flea control. Please call us at 905-623-4012 to discuss which form of prevention would be best for your pet.
DERMATOLOGY (SKIN)
Pets can have a variety of skin problems. If your pet displays any of the following issues, please call us for an appointment:
PUPPY AND KITTEN CARE
Both puppies and kittens get to enjoy initial protection against infectious diseases from their mother’s milk if the mother has been vaccinated regularly. This protection only lasts for a few weeks, so you will need to vaccinate your puppy or kitten at an early age.
You may not have to worry too much, as most puppies and kittens are typically vaccinated with their first vaccine boosters before going to their new homes. If they haven’t had their first vaccine boosters just yet, then we recommend you bring them in to visit us as soon as possible so that we can provide the boosters they require.
In addition to getting vaccine boosters, new puppies and kittens need to be dewormed regularly. Some of the parasites are zoonotic, which means they can be passed onto people.
We recommend deworming every two weeks until your new family member is 12 weeks old and then monthly until they are six months old. In addition to regular deworming, we also recommend sending a fecal sample to a laboratory so that we can check and ensure that there aren’t any parasites that we aren’t routinely deworming for.
To book an appointment for your pet’s annual health exam or for one of our other services, get in touch with Durham Veterinary Clinic today.
