Hey All, Last year, my vet recommended NextGuard & HeartGuard for prevention. I am wondering if there is an equivalent prevention to fleas, ticks and heartwroms? A friend mentioned to me that he never uses anything other than a special shampoo treatment. Keep in mind, my dog loves the woods and hiking. Any thoughts? Thanks
Last year we were given Revolution for fleas, ticks and heartworm (a monthly topical that goes on between the shoulder blades May-November) and worming treatment. This year, the ticks are meant to be especially bad in our region and our vet (and all local vets, it seems) are prescribing Bravecto (a chewable). Based on my research, I declined Bravecto and stuck with Revolution and we will stay away from known/especially bad tick areas.
Bravecto is very similar to NextGuard and HeartGuard from what I understand. Any reason why you declined it?
I declined it for a few reasons; I didn't feel like I had done enough research on it to agree to it while we were at the vet clinic. Our vet didn't know a ton about it either. Our vet said we could return the revolution/worming treatment and switch if I changed my mind once I did my research (haha). Once I did look it up online, I found it is very new to the market, so not a lot is known about long term effects and there were quite a few articles about potential side effects, which can happen with any medication of course, but I felt that our risk to ticks is low enough that I wanted to stick with medication that I know Quinn did fine on last year. Revolution has been on the market much longer (but is not as strong against ticks, and I guess might be getting outdated now). I can't comment on NextGuard or HeartGuard as we weren't given those as options and I didn't do any research on them. For now, I decided I was more comfortable in going with what we used last year, and avoiding heavy tick locations (there is a risk to ppl as well, but we don't have a preventative med so I don't want to go to those places either!) as well as checking Quinn nightly for ticks. I will probably chat to some vet friends and get their thoughts, do some more reading and re-evaluate next year.
