How Can You Tell If Your Pet Is Healthy On The Inside…?

If your pet seems healthy, that’s great!

But Pets That Appear To Be Happy And Healthy Can Actually Be Quite Sick!

  • Pets with dental disease often appear to play with their food – not to have fun, but because their mouth is so sore it hurts to chew.
  • Kidney disease is known as the ‘silent killer’ amongst veterinarians because up to 70% of kidney function can be lost before the affected pet shows any visible signs of illness. It CANNOT be diagnosed early just by looking as there are no symptoms until it’s too late. However, if detected and treated early, before symptoms appear, pets can live with the condition for many years.
  • Intestinal parasites can cause diarrhea, blindness and death in people and animals, but it’s common for infected pets to only show symptoms from time to time. (The symptoms will depend on the life-stage of the parasite, amongst other things.

Our wellness packages help our doctors determine how healthy your pet is on the inside. We send a blood sample to a lab and the results give information about how your pet is doing internally.

We offer two levels of wellness plans – the Wellness and the Wellness Plus. The packages (and prices) are identical for dogs and cats. We recommend junior pets (pets under the age of 7) receive a Wellness Package once a year, and senior pets (pets aged 7 and over) the Wellness Plus Package.

Both packages include:

  • Blood work. Your pet may look perfectly healthy on the outside, but what about the inside?
  • Heartworm test, as recommended by the American Heartworm Society. Required before we can prescribe heartworm preventatives.
  • Parasite screening test (fecal), as recommended by the Companion Animal Parasite council. 34% of dogs and cats have intestinal parasites (Vet. Therapeut. 2008, vol. 9, no. 3), which can cause diarrhea, blindness and death in people and animals.

Wellness Plus package additionally includes:

  • More comprehensive blood work, including a thyroid component
  • Urinalysis – the ‘window’ to the kidney!

Please contact us for an appointment.

As can be seen from the tables below, both cats and dogs age much more quickly than people, and therefore the 12 months that elapse between annual wellness bloodwork is really anywhere from about four to ten ‘dog years’ or ‘cat years’. So, although having bloodwork done on an apparently well pet every year may seem excessively frequent, it’s not.