What is the best tick prevention for dogs?

Regular and ongoing use of flea prevention products, combined with good home hygiene, helps break the flea life cycle and prevents infestations indoors. Because flea infestations can happen any time of year and often go unnoticed until they’re severe, consistent, year-round flea prevention is essential to protect your pet and home.

At Northwest Animal Hospital, we recommend Vectra 3D, a monthly topical tick prevention that contains a repellant medication combined with a tick killing medication. It not only kills ticks, fleas, mosquitoes and biting flies, it prevents up to 80% of them from even jumping on to your dog. The small percentage of ticks that do land on your dog’s fur are immediately affected by the medication and are unable to walk or attach to the skin. Within minutes, the ticks fall off your dog and die, rendering them unable to affect your family or other pets. When deciding on the best tick prevention, it is important to consider what you are using a tick prevention for. If you truly want the product to help prevent your dog from getting infected with a tick-borne disease, make sure you use a product that can prevent ticks from attaching to your pet. In order for the product to prevent Lyme, Anaplasma and Ehrlichia, it needs to have a repellant property so the ticks never have a chance to bite and attach to your dog. At Northwest Animal Hospital, we recommend topical products because we feel that the safety and disease prevention of the topical medications by far outweighs the minor inconvenience of using a topical product.