Where do you buy your worming tablets/flea medications?

[nic]

Do you buy your pets worming tablets/flea medications from a vet or online?
Any recommendations for who to buy from online? I need to get some new stuff for our dog.
What brand do you buy? There seems to be so many of them

Nic

[christy]

Nic its a confusing world of worming/flea treatments for dogs and cats nowadays. Everyone will have their favourite & think theirs is the best! The one thing is to steer clear of non brand name ones... because sometimes the supermarket ones have organophosphates which is a toxin for some animals.

I use: drontal for intestinal worming, heart guard for heart worming and advantage for flea treatments. Drontal is a tablet, heart guard is a chew and advantage is a top spot.

now-a-days there are heaps of top spots which do all three functions. They generally seem expensive, but if you compare the value monthly, its pretty average. Advocate and Revolution do everything but tapeworm.... but tapeworm is spread from fleas so if they are treating fleas, they reckon that they are treating tapeworm at the same time. Unfortunately it takes 1 flea bite to spread tapeworm. BUT tapeworm is the easiest fix, you just pop to the vet & get a tapeworm tablet over the counter.

I don't use the topspots because I get free heartguard.

[~ Mylitta ~]

Hi Nic. You're right, there are sooo many brands to choose from these days. Like Christy said, I'd stick to the bigger brand names. The companies do a lot more R&D on their products and the products use the newest and safest chemicals/drugs.

With the online stores the thing you have to be concerned about is how they store their product. There was an article in one of the vet publications recently that found that a lot of online stores keep all their stock in big warehouses that are not temperature controlled, and that if the temperature in the warehouses gets too high it inactivates the product. So yes, the spend a lot less, but you also get a product that no longer works at all.

The most common products I use on my dog are either Sentinel Spectrum (is a tablet that sterilises adult fleas and kills all the nasty worms, including tapeworm and heartworm), or I just use something like a drontal chew (for the gut worms) and either frontline or advantage for fleas. Luckily heartworm is extremely low risk in my area so I don't have to be too worried about that little nasty.