We test with blood, so we draw a couple of drops of blood from your pet. Many of them don't tend to mind it one bit. And we have a test here in-house that we run that lets us detect any of those adult female worms present in your dog.

If we don't treat that heartworm, as I said, it ultimately could cause the death of your dog. We obviously don't want that for your pet, and that's why we always recommend prevention.

Depending on which prevention you choose, it's going to be for the most part the same as any medication. So perhaps your dog has a sensitive stomach and you see a little bit of GI upset. If we're giving ProHeart here in the clinic, it's not uncommon to have a bit of injection site soreness, just like when they get a vaccine.

There are, but I think, the risks of some injection site soreness or having to do some exercise restriction or things like that with your dog are far better than treating your pet for the disease unless they have many other underlying conditions. But for the most part, I think it's much better to prevent than treat your pet for the disease.

The biggest one is that heartworm disease can kill your pet. That's why a lot of veterinarians or almost all veterinarians are so adamant about heartworm prevention—it is a disease that can kill.

If a mosquito can get into your house, then your pet can get heartworm.

As I said, we have the adult heartworm, and then we have some larval stages. And so often, when you think of heartworm and talk to your veterinarian, we're talking to you a lot about heartworm prevention. And what we're trying to do with that prevention is kill the larval stage of that heartworm so that it never develops into an adult worm that lives in the heart. Whereas when we diagnose a pet with heartworm disease, it's because we're picking up those adult worm antigens that are living in the heart or maybe the pulmonary vessels—the vessels going to the lungs. And we do a separate protocol for the treatment of those adult worms.

I probably see, on average here, at least between 10 and 20 cases a year. So that might not seem like a lot, but to me, it's significant. Especially with the river being right here because, of course, heartworm is transmitted by mosquitoes, so where you've got lots of water, you've got lots of mosquitoes.