sunsetredbeagles wrote:Does this take care of all worms and is it a pill that you give every month?Reason i am asking is that i give a pill every month to my dogs but just this past week i had a dog to get a type of tape worm. Thought that the pills i was giving was to take care of them.The vet told me that there is not a pill out there that will prevent all worms?
No wormer gets rid of every worm. This is a fallacy.
Drontal wormers (and their equivalents) are essentially a colossal waste of money. They are, essentially, a combination of several different wormers in one ... and yet you can buy each of these wormers, separately, for a whole lot cheaper than you can buying them all together.
Worse, the most expensive wormer in the "mix" (
praziquantel) is rarely ever necessary. The only thing it does is treat tapeworm, so if you don't have tapes you don't need the
praziquantel. Why worm your dogs for $1.33 (or $3.50), to treat tapeworms your dogs don't have, when you can worm them for $0.07 (seven cents)! There is absolutely no reason to use
praziquantel (Droncit, Drontal, or their equivalent) on a monthly basis. If your dogs repeatedly have tapeworm, you are being lax in your flea control! Control the fleas, get rid of the tapes ONCE, and then go back to standard, less expensive wormers for your monthly worm prevention.
Worse still, the
fenbental in these pills is an utter waste of money and is only in there for "show." What do I mean by this? I mean excactly this:
fenbental is for whipworm,
but it has to be dosed twice daily, for 3 days in a row, to be effective ... therefore, giving only "one" Drontal (or equivalent) doesn't give anywhere near enough
fenbental to your dog,
so it doesn't actually do a thing for whipworm.
And still worse than the above, regarding hookworm, the
pyrantel pamoate that is in Drontal (etc.) is only dosed for ROUNDWORM ... for hookworm
pyrantel pamoate needs to be
double-dosed and also given for
3 days in a row to kill them. Therefore, yet again, Drontal (etc.)
doesn't actually do a thing for hookworm either.
People who actually know what they're doing do NOT use these catch-all wormers for precisely these reasons: they're too expensive and they're improperly-dosed for hooks and whips. You'd have to triple your dose for hooks--and multiply it x6 for whips! And, again, the most expensive ingredient is for tapes, and (if you're on top of fleas) your dogs won't even have tapes. Why give 3 Drontal pills to a dog with hookworm, but no tapeworm? Why spend $3 to $9, per dog, when you could spend $0.21 (twenty-one cents per dog), wasting tapeworm meds when the dog doesn't even have tapes? (You can double these figures for whips.)
Instead, treat your dogs for what they need. Buy Panacur for whips,
pyrantel pamoate for rounds and hooks, and only use
praziquantel (Droncit) for a confirmed case of tapes. You will be able to taylor your dosages correctly and you will ONLY spend what you need to spend to get the job done ... rather than mis-dosing on half the worms you're trying to get, all the while pouring your money down the drain treating for tapes your dogs probably don't even have.
Education is everything ...
.
