A New Litter

Yesterday afternoon I picked up seven 4-week old puppies from the Champaign County Humane Society. We’ll have them for a month or so, then they’ll go back to CCHS for adoption.

They’re filthy, smell really bad, and were infested with fleas and roundworms. Fleas can be a very serious problem for puppies. Not only do fleas carry tapeworms, if the population gets out of hand the fleas can actually suck enough blood from a puppy to make it anemic. The pups will be tested for tapeworms in a couple of weeks.

Roundworms, which look a little like spaghetti, are equally dangerous. They live in the intestines and take up nutrients that puppies need to grow. A telltale sign of roundworms in a puppy is a large, distended belly. People often mistake a puppy’s big belly as a cute sign of health, but it’s actually quite the opposite.

The medical staff at CCHS gave them medication to kill the worms and treated the pups with Advantage to get rid of the fleas. The pups will be wormed at least one more time before leaving us to go to their new homes.

Bart (m)
Ned (m)
Homer (m)
Maude (f)
Lisa (f)
Maggie (f)
Marge (f)

Parasites. Yuck!

It’s a fact of life that puppies get infected with internal parasites. The most common internal parasites we deal with are roundworms and tapeworms. The most common external parasite is the flea.

Puppies get the roundworms from their mother, either through the uterus or via her milk. The in utero larvae are transferred from mother to puppy and live in the pup’s lungs. When they are born, the puppies cough up the larvae and swallow them. The worms then grow in the small intestines. That’s why nearly all puppies have roundworms…they are infected before they are born.

You can’t help but to be amazed at the Rube Goldberg nature of the lifecycle, but roundworms are especially bad for the pups. They live in the small intestine and absorb nutrients that should be helping the puppies grow and can actually damage the lining of the intestine. There are no outward signs of a mild infestation, but pups with a heavy load of roundworms have dull hair coats, pot bellies, and can become anemic with vomiting, diarrhea, or constipation. Sometimes people will comment on a puppy with a big belly being “cute.” It’s not cute at all. It’s a sign of a heavy load of worms.

Tapeworms are carried by fleas. At this time of year fleas are less of a problem, but if mom had fleas in the fall while she was pregnant she may have passed tapeworm eggs to the babies. Daisy had a tapeworm when she came here so it’s possible the pups will have them, too. We’ve already checked Daisy and the puppies for fleas and, thankfully, didn’t find any.

How do we know the pups had roundworms? We saw live worms in the poop. Now that the puppies are eating solid food they are moving a lot more volume through their intestines. The puppies get a growth spurt, but so do the worms. They look like spaghetti.

The treatment is very simple…half of a milliliter of Strongid liquid by mouth is all it takes to kill the adult worms. We repeat the dose in a couple of weeks.