This is a very important question. The answer is yes, although it isn't common in America. An example includes ringworm, a skin parasite in cats that is extremely contagious and can be transmitted to people. Regarding intestinal parasites, roundworms are a serious issue in other countries and can be transmitted from animal feces to people. Roundworms can be found in really weird places. They found them in the eyeballs of people and sometimes in the brain, where they can be devastating. Fortunately, we don't see them in America a lot, but it's still possible.

The next parasite is hookworms. Hookworms are not as life-threatening as roundworms, but they can be problematic. If the larvae of the hookworm are in the stool or the yard, and a person walks in that environment barefoot, they can burrow into the skin and cause intense itching. Hookworms are usually self-limiting and go away, but it's not very fun or comfortable. The best way to minimize risks to people is to focus on the guidelines we mentioned about prevention. Be hygienic, pick up the stool, wash your hands, and keep all the pets on good parasite prevention. These measures will all reduce your risk of getting infected.

The best thing you can do is to clean the litter boxes at least once a day to lessen the fecal exposure of other cats. Another important thing is to have an adequate number of litter box boxes for the number of cats in your house. You have the ideal recommendation. Depending on the household, the ideal number of litter boxes is one litter box per cat plus one. Having plenty of litter box resources will help reduce fecal exposure between the cats. We recommend putting those litter boxes in different places around the house. If your cats are messy with the litter box, get into the habit of wiping their feet every so often. Again, I can't stress the importance of regular parasite prevention for all the cats enough, even if you only have indoor cats.

We use medications that help reduce the magnitude of parasites with reasonable confidence. For example, the cat product we use at Summer Creek Animal Clinic is called Revolution Plus. It is a prevention for heartworms, fleas, ticks, and it contains an intestinal parasite dewormer. So it does deworm for the common intestinal parasites we see in cats, but it does not treat tapeworms or coccidia, for example. Those parasites require very specific deworming that isn't in most monthly preventions. But again, the Revolution Plus prevents fleas extremely well, reducing cats' exposure to tapeworms. There are medications like Revolution Plus, among others, that will greatly reduce your cat's chance of getting intestinal parasites. Different parasites require different treatments, contributing to the importance of having your cat's fecal matter tested at least annually.

Fleas transmit tapeworms in cats. The cat has to ingest the fleas, so you don't have to have a severe infestation of fleas to have a problem. One or two fleas can be on your cat, and when they bite the flea, they get exposed. The best way to prevent tapeworms in your cat is to have them on monthly, year-round quality flea prevention. It doesn't completely eliminate the potential for exposure, but it's uncommon to see tapeworms in a cat that's on prevention. That includes indoor-only cats. We see many indoor-only cats with fleas and tapeworms as a result.

Some cats go in and outside in multi-cat households and transmit parasites through fecal contamination. So even if the feces is picked up, animals still step in it and we get fecal material on our shoes. We can bring it into the house, get on the pet skin, and when they're grooming, they get infected. They get exposure even without gross fecal material being apparent. They also get parasites from the soil, so they'll get exposed if they are indoor-outdoor cats. We see intestinal parasites in indoor-only cats as well because fecal material can be transported in microscopic amounts so easily. Those are the common ways that cats get exposed to intestinal parasites. Kittens specifically are the most susceptible to these worms, and they often get these parasites from their mother. We'll sometimes see young kittens with multiple worms, depending on the situation with the mom and the litter.

We can, with reasonable confidence, prevent most parasites. The problem with saying we can prevent them altogether is that environmental exposure can sometimes be very high, and even with monthly deworming, you can still end up with parasites. It's hard to deworm for every potential parasite. By following the next steps, we can reasonably and confidently prevent most parasites in cats: ensuring that your indoor cat's litter box is cleaned at least once a day to ensure that the feces is picked up because that's commonly how parasites are transmitted. Make sure your pet is on monthly broad-spectrum parasite prevention year-round, especially if you're in Fort-Worth, Texas, or in a similar climate. Fleas transmit some intestinal parasites, so ensuring that your pets are on good flea prevention will help to avoid that particular parasite called tapeworms. Following these steps can greatly reduce the chance of your pet getting intestinal parasites.

That's a good question because we see this type of thing a lot. Human food can inherently make your dog overweight, but not necessarily. You can feed your dog small amounts of human food and still keep your dog lean. The problem is, once you start feeding them human food, they become more acclimated to it. They end up hanging around you when you're eating and begging a lot more. You end up giving them more food. In most circumstances, dogs tend to be overweight when they're fed human food regularly. Another thing to consider is when you're feeding your dog human food in addition to their normal dog food, the density of those calories is much more impactful because the animal is much smaller than us. This is especially true for smaller dogs, but it applies to any dog.

Even a small piece of meat in a 10-pound dog is like an entire meal for somebody our size. So giving them human food on top of their dog food, will set them up to be overweight. The other part of that is that if they are getting more than 10% of their daily caloric intake from foods that are not their balanced dog nutrition, you risk having a nutrient imbalance. And typically, when people are feeding human food, dogs will tend to lean more heavily on human food and eat their dog food less and less. This is commonly the case to the point where they're not even eating their dog food anymore, or only sporadically because they're getting their nutrients and their food on the human side.

That is setting them up for nutrient imbalances unless you're really diligent about it. Regardless of their weight, there is a much higher risk of having significant GI-related issues, particularly pancreatitis and a condition called HGE, which can sometimes be related to certain food indiscretions. Feeding dogs human food, specifically high-fat meals, in even small amounts, triggers those types of conditions, which are potentially very dangerous and certainly very costly to deal with.

It depends on the salon. Certain salons have a lot of experience with cats. If the facility's right, like when there are not many dogs and cats together in kennels, and if it's more like a mobile grooming salon, grooming can be done without any sort of medication or sedation. If cats are groomed routinely as maintenance, only doing it every so often is sufficient. Grooming at our veterinary facility entails a lot of medical grooming on cats, which can be challenging. Across the board, we provide sedation for the cats when they get grooming to make it as comfortable and as safe as possible. We coordinate with our medical and our grooming staff to be able to support that type of professional grooming. That allows us to do a good job, especially with these matted cats, in as safe a manner as possible.