As hopefully most of you know, we’ve launched a new GREEN pet club this summer. This has come from increasing concerns that we are over medicating some pets with anti-flea medication and this may be having environmental impacts.
In the green pet club, we’re suggesting that dogs and cats are flea-treated every other month as opposed to every month. This also reduces the amount of chemicals going into our pets, but also reduces the pet club cost. We’ve been doing this for 3 months so far and, despite being high season for fleas, have not noted any upturn in the number of flea infection cases within the practice, which is really encouraging.
Interestingly, the government has made a recent announcement on this front – they have published a ‘roadmap’ to try and gather more information about this subject and consider future regulations:
There have also been two recent articles on the BBC website about this matter, which might be of interest; links below. They are mainly referencing ‘topical’ flea medications for dogs – the vast majority of our pet club dogs are on oral medications so the risks of dog swimming in waterways is null. However, even the oral medications still need to be defaecated out when our dogs go to the toilet, and we’re not currently sure what impact that has. So, we think our proposed compromise of oral every other month treatment is a sensible course of action for now.
I’m proud that here at Kelperland we’re already making changes and trying to address this issue. As an independent practice, that’s what we can achieve quite easily. Hopefully, we can inspire other practices and big corporate groups to do the same.
- https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c78m5yx58k5o.amp
- https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-hampshire-68400630
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