Treating skin problems in dogs with some sneaky sausages
Skin diseases are extremely common in Thailand and I would presume a lot of other tropical countries as well. Insects are the primary and almost exclusive cause of skin diseases in dogs and cats and in an environment that is rarely, if ever cold, bugs thrive.
Therefore it is just an accepted and normal part of life that a dog, especially a stray or homeless dog, is going to end up with some sort of parasitic infection or infestation at one point or another. The trick is to make sure you take on the problem once you notice it because if the skin breaks, the external problem can become an internal one and this is a much more severe and difficult to treat issue.
Some of our dog pals are very hesitant to take their medicine though and we have to get a bit creative to get them eat it.
In the past we used a chewable medication called "Bravecto" that I guess tasted like a dog treat and almost all of the dogs would gobble it down no problem. I don't know why but this brand has become difficult to find as of late so we have had to move on to another product that is essentially the same thing.
Administering this to your own pet that you have known for a long time would probably be easy, but I am only somewhat familiar with all of these dogs at the temples and I am not comfortable with sticking my hands in their mouths. They probably aren't either and I am interested in keeping my fingers. Therefore we got a bit creative on the day that we decided to treat everyone at the temple.
The fact that they ended up shaped like hearts was me being a bit silly but what is really going on here is that we had a bunch of sausage meat and we hid the pill inside of it. This worked like a charm and the only danger was someone coming by for seconds.
A "double dose" of this medication is extremely unlikely to cause any medical issues with the dog but our reasoning for not wanting to give them two of them is because we are on a very strict budget right now and we can't have doggos coming back unnecessarily for a second round of medication that they no longer need. Thankfully the monks here are a lot more familiar with the dogs than we are and they were able to help us with crowd control.
As you may know, cats are a lot more picky about what they will eat so we had to get a more expensive version of the same medication for the few cats that are also living at this temple. Once again the monks did most of the work here because it is rare that the cats will even approach us at all since they don't really know us.
So we treated all the animals in this temple in the same day and this is kind of important since the idea is to kill off the parasites all in one go. Although it is really unlikely to permanently eliminate the problem it does make it considerably less likely that the problem will return quickly since we treat every animal all at once. Parasites don't just go away like that though, we aren't ever going to stop the problem, we are just slowing it down.
It was a fun day with the dogs though and even though they don't know it, those tasty treats they ate are actually helping them on the inside and out as well.
If you would like to see how you can help out or simply spread the word, please visit our website at
http://krabianimalwelfare.org
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