The Truth About Heartworms - Part 1

The Truth About Heartworms

By Dr. Jean Hofve, Veterinarian Advisor

For the past two years, veterinarians and pharmaceutical companies have teamed up in a marketing campaign to frighten pet guardians into giving year-round heartworm preventatives to both dogs and cats. The campaign has really ramped up this year. They say they're doing this to improve protection for individual pets, but we need to take a closer look to discover the truth.

How do pets get heartworms?

Heartworms are transmitted by mosquitoes. Tiny heartworm larvae, called microfilaria, circulate in the blood, and are sucked up by the bug when it feeds on an infected host animal; for heartworms, their natural host is the dog. Once inside the mosquito, the larvae must develop through more stages before they can infect another dog. For that to occur, outside temperatures must remain above 57 degrees F, day and night, for a minimum of 8 days. The warmer the temperature, the faster the larvae will mature. If the temperature drops below that critical level, larval development will stop; but the larvae don't die—development will re-start at the same point when the weather warms back up. Larvae reach their infective stage in 8 to 30 days (the latter being the entire lifespan of the average mosquito).
When an infected mosquito bites a dog or cat, the heartworm microfilaria are deposited on the skin, where they crawl into the bite wound and enter the bloodstream. Inside the body, they get ready to "settle down and raise a family." In dogs, the heartworm natural host, the larvae migrate to the heart and eventually develop into adult worms, reproduce, fill the blood with microfilaria, and pass it on to the next mosquito. The maturation process takes 6-7 months.

"Heartworms have been diagnosed even in cats who spend 100% of their time indoors."

Dog by Dog – A Puppy Mill Documentary

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Dog by Dog – A Puppy Mill Documentary

by Steve Siadek

           Pawsworthy Pet Heroes

You’ve seen the commercials that pull at our heart strings by showing us the tragic faces of unadopted shelter pets. Those sad eyes & hopeless, behind-the-fence stares.

 

Well, in recent years all of us in the pet community have seen a growing number of documentaries that pull at those very same heart strings by exposing the sickening underworld of puppy mills, which, while we don’t talk about puppy mills enough (in large part, I think, because it’s such a horrifically unsettling topic for all of us who love pets), remains a huge problem.

Thankfully many companies & videographers are working to raise public awareness. We applaud their efforts immensely – as raising awareness is a critical first step.

However, too few puppy mill documentaries have addressed the root of the issue & examined the umbrella of monetary support that allows the puppy mill system to thrive. Rather than looking at individual mills – which are the effect of the system, not the cause – too few films have zoomed the magnification out & looked at what’s driving the economics that have sentenced millions of healthy dogs death and allowed the most irresponsible dog breeders to thrive.

DOG BY DOG First Trailer from 5414Productions on Vimeo.

In Dog by Dog, a documentary that will be released in 2014, Chris Grimes and the team behind the award-winning documentary A SECOND KNOCK AT THE DOOR, do what most haven’t: they take a look into the underbelly of the puppy mill system. Grimes asks tough, then follows the money trail from lobbyists to state capitals and Washington D.C. The not for profit film confronts those responsible in an effort to help catalyze change to an irresponsible system.

Mill-by-mill and dog-by-dog things need to change, which is why we applaud the in the trenches work that Chris & other passionate videographers are doing. Scene-by-scene and frame-by-frame the Dog by Dog documentary – and other unbiased non-profit films – are tangible steps in the right direction toward putting an end to puppy mills.

To learn more about the Dog by Dog project 0r to track the upcoming release date of the film, check out the Dog by Dog Facebook page.

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