Really!? Wow. All mine are rescues and all have been spayed/neutured and have had their shots so were thoroughly checked out by our vet and none of them have ever had worms. I guess we’ve been lucky! Ear mites? Yes. Fleas? Yes. No worms. How do you know if they have worms? They don’t gain weight? It pops out in their stool?
Nothing wrong with being lucky. My latest was a stray without fleas, and I didn’t look a gift horse...ummm, cat...in the mouth.
Worms are generally detected with a fecal test, although in one case I saw many years ago a tiny little kitten barfed up a big honking worm. (Pretty conclusive, IMO.)
I was lucky up until this year. Neither had ever had worms in their lives. The cat & the dog have both had tapeworms in the last month. The fleas have been terrible. Even the Advantage/Advantix is not working as well. And no matter what you do you can’t control people who won’t control their pets that run loose in your yard bringing their treasures with them. Tapeworms are flat & segmented. I saw it when I took the dog out & the cat was getting thin. Vet said they came from eating a flea.
“How do you know if they have worms? They don’t gain weight? It pops out in their stool?”
Depends on the type of worm. Hookworms can have a noticeable effect on a pet’s nutritional absorption. I’m not sure if they are visible to the naked eye in the animal’s stool. A quick online search says hookworms can be absorbed through the skin or can be passed through mother’s milk. Apparently they can also infest soil until an unlucky host comes by.
Tapeworm segments are visible on stools and around the pet’s anus as little flat grains of rice. Compared to hookworms they do little damage to a pet, but are rather gross when your charming feline brushes one off against you, LOL. It your kitty cleaned a flea off her skin or consumed it on a prey animal, that’s how she got a tapeworm. My vet whom I’ve known for many years will diagnose that over the phone and allow me to pick up wormer without bringing the cat in for a visit, which is nice, but then I’m left struggling to get it into my cat ...
The worst worm infestation I’ve seen was in a pitbull seized from a fighting ring. The animal control officer said the owner had been trying to starve it into aggression. Along with deliberate starvation - skin and bones, just lethargic - the dog had worms so bad that, as was explained to me, he had to fight the well-meaning urge to fatten up the animal to normal weight with large amounts of food. Too much food at one time (and I assume he also dewormed) would have forced too many worms to unhook from the intestines at once, causing life-threatening blood loss.