What Breeders Need To Know About Parasites

What do you need to know about parasites, as a dog breeder? There’s a couple of things I want to share with you today.

Pregnant Bitches and Gut Parasites

The first one is, you’ve got to realize something about helminth (worms) intestinal parasites in the dog: Very few intestinal parasites [roundworm, hookworm, and tapeworm ] ever make it to adulthood in a healthy dog, because their immune system keeps most of them from developing.

Adult dogs may still get infected from their environment via fecal contamination, when they’re playing with their toys on a yard where the poop hasn’t been picked up very often. But the larvae they pick up from their environment rarely make it to being adults in the gut. Instead, they go dormant in the body tissues of the dog.

That all changes – if the dog happens to be a bitch – when she becomes pregnant.

All those dormant hookworm and roundworm larvae wake up and enter the bloodstream. From the bloodstream, they go straight into the placenta, and straight into the puppies that are sitting in her uterus.

As a result puppies can be born with roundworm or hookworm, before they’ve even taken their first breath.

Similarly, roundworm and hookworm larvae will continue to go via the bitch’s milk into puppies when they suckle.

Puppies as a Hazard to the Health of Small Children 

Puppies whose mom wasn’t wormed, and that don’t get wormed regularly when they’re with you, the breeder, will end up being the classically wormy puppy with the big pot belly and the skinny little body.

Apart from worminess not being good for their health, those puppies are a serious public health hazard.  They (and their Mom) will be shedding massive amounts of parasites into the environment.

Small children from the ages of zero to four years old are particularly vulnerable to these hookworm and roundworm parasites.   Little kids, with their underdeveloped immune systems and habit of putting everything into their mouth, can easily become infected.   And the parasite larvae can end up in their eye, or in their brain, and cause permanent damage to those children.

That’s why as breeders, we have to make sure we’re not selling wormy puppies out into the world.

Worming Regime for Pregnant Bitches and Their Puppies

So, you should be worming your bitch at mating, and in the third trimester, like week seven or eight of pregnancy. And you should also worm her whenever you worm the pups during suckling. Because she will be shedding a lot of parasites also via her feces at this time.

To see all recommended routine treatments get a FREE copy of the Pregnancy Care Chart here.

Depending on the formulation you use for puppy wormer, we would be worming our puppies at two weeks old, four weeks old, [and with some formulations, six weeks old], and then again, at eight weeks old. When we do the eight-week-old one, we should also be covering them for tapeworm.

Intestinal Parasites in Adult Dogs is A Different Story…

What about adult dogs? A lot of vets will recommend to owners that they use a backline spot-on formulation that “nukes” everything: it kills intestinal parasites, it kills fleas. It kills lice. It kills heartworm, it kills ticks.

Many breeders, and our owner customers, are using these backlines thinking they’re doing a really good job of taking care of their dog.
But the problem with that is, we actually need some parasites in our guts, to be healthy.  Why? Because the presence of intestinal parasites calms our immune system and teaches it to be more tolerant.

We do know that in humans, auto-immune conditions – where the body itself attacks its own tissue – are on the rise, and they certainly are in dogs as well.  We also know that deliberately infecting humans with intestinal parasites, for example hookworm, can actually help reteach the immune system not to over-react.

We don’t have that information about dogs yet, but we do know auto-immune conditions are on the rise in dogs.

I suspect that part of the reason for that is that we worm them too much.

If we just let adult dogs (that aren’t pregnant or suckling puppies) have a few parasites – if they’re healthy, that’s all they’re going to tolerate anyway – then we could actually be helping their immune system to function better.

We all know about the relationship between gut health and immunity. If we are too clean and we nuke everything, then our immune systems will actually not function as they’re meant to.
Think about it: We’ve got millions of years of evolution behind ourselves and our dogs. During that time, we have evolved to live harmoniously with our parasites.

Fast Forward to the Present

The problem that arises for modern dogs is when they’re stuck in a small backyard, and that backyard is habitually littered with feces. In this situation they are exposed to much higher levels of parasite larval contamination of their environment than they would be if they were in the wild.
In the wild, they’d hardly ever encounter feces, and if they did they would try to avoid them. All species tend to avoid their own feces for exactly this kind of reason.
If you want to avoid that problem, then you need to tell your owners and also practice yourself, cleaning up dog feces at least once a week.
This is because it takes more than seven days for the eggs, the intestinal parasite eggs that are in those feces, to actually hatch out and contaminate the yard.

If you’re picking up your feces every Sunday, your yard would not become super-contaminated. As a result, you won’t have to be worming your dog over, and over, and over again. That will give your dog a better chance of being healthy and avoiding autoimmune diseases.

If You Have to Worm

I advise to worm as little as possible. You can have fecal egg counts done to see if your dog is carrying a high enough burden of intestinal parasites to warrant worming.
The best time to worm is when you have a “captive audience” of parasites in the gut. Worm larvae survive for prolonged periods in the environment if it is warm and moist. Hostile times for them are when the outside environment is not warm and moist. If you live in a climate that has pleasantly warm moist summers and freezing winters, then the best time to worm would be towards the end of winter.
For those like myself who live in a climate with pleasantly warm moist winters and stinking hot, dry summers, then the end of summer or early autumn would be the best time to worm.

What About Heartworm?

Treatment of an existing, mature heartworm infection can be dangerous for the dog.

When the arsenic-based drug is given to an infected dog, the massive die-off of the worms can cause severe inflammation and even respiratory failure. Not all dogs survive treatment. Clearly, prevention is the best option!

Preventing Heartworm 

Heartworm is spread by mosquitos, in regions and seasons when mosquitos are active.

It takes 6 months for a new heartworm infection to progress to an adult heartworm in the heart of your dog.

Therefore if you treat your dog with a preventative every 3 months during seasons when mosquitos may be active, you will stop the buildup of adult heartworm in the heart.

There are many “all-wormers” that prevent heartworm as well as kill all intestinal parasites and even fleas. Given that we’d ideally like a few intestinal parasites to survive, I do not recommend these products. Instead there are ivermectin-based products that specifically kill the heartworm only, which is what I suggest you use.

This protection should start well before the dog reaches 5 months of age and continue every few months (the drug companies and your vet will say every month) for the life of the dog, particularly during times of the year when mosquitos are active.

If you get a dog that has not had such a treatment regime maintained, then you must not give it heartworm prevention medication! That is because it may have adult worms already living in the heart. If you medicate, these can die and float off into the arteries of the lungs, to lodge in and block the smaller arterioles, leading to massive death of lung tissue and a possibly fatal outcome!

What About Fleas?

I recommend only treating for fleas if they are actually present. So check by tipping your dog over and inspecting the bare part of the tummy. You can also brush your dog and put the detritus that falls out of the coat onto a damp paper towel. If you see red, bloody looking spots develop that is flea dirt.

The first principle to understand in effectively controlling fleas is that the adult fleas you see on your dog are only the tip of the iceberg of your flea infestation. So control aimed only at killing the adult fleas on the dog – such as with collars, sprays, spot-ons, powders and shampoos – is utterly flawed. Apart from leaving unscathed the 95% of your flea population that will exist as eggs, larvae or pupae in the environment around your dog, they also rarely kill every flea on your pet, nor prevent them all from breeding.

Given the difficulty of getting at immature flea stages, prevention of flea population buildup is by far the best strategy.

So if you suspect fleas, medicate with a product that not only kills fleas, but also prevents the production of viable eggs, and do it promptly!