Technically, no, they're not all necessary, especially those considered non-core, if you will. There are certain lifestyles that your cat may live and certain things they may be exposed to. But as far as the core vaccines, yeah, we consider those necessary for all pets unless certain medical conditions would go against that, but those are uncommon. And then back to the whole legality of rabies vaccine—that one is considered very necessary. As a matter of fact, it's a legal requirement.

First of all, we know exams are critical. Not that they necessarily outweigh some of the importance of vaccines, but there's a lot that we need to learn and remember that exams themselves are essential to your cat's health. That's what you're getting the vaccines for is for your cat's health. But as far as some other factors, there does need to be a certain legality of a client-patient relationship that we have to maintain to make recommendations, give medications, and do vaccines like that.

We need to maintain an exam, usually at least once a year, to keep that client-patient relationship. But then, more specifically for the individual cats, we want to make sure that they're well and healthy enough on that day to get the vaccine and make sure they don't have fevers, make sure there's no certain concurrent disease that would interfere with the vaccine function or the safety of the vaccine. We also want to know your pet's history through exams and things like that, so we know whether they have a disease that would make a certain vaccine potentially unsafe to perhaps change the protocol, do pre-meds, or other things like that. It’s not that we're just trying to be mean about it. There are many important reasons why we need to have that exam with vaccines.

Again, we'll recommend the best products for you. And then if you use them, you shouldn't have to do anything else in your home. If you do have a bad flea infestation, we’ll have you vacuum a lot, but really we just want to treat the pet.

There are all kinds of anecdotes out there made of brewers yeast and essential oils. I don't know; there are just tons of them out there. They don't work at all—you're wasting your money, and sometimes they're even more dangerous than they sound. Just because they're natural doesn't mean they're safe, effective, or okay to use. The best thing is to come in here and have us help you pick out the best preventative and treatment plan for your dog and cat.

Parasites have learned how to live on the pet for their entire lives. They will not go away on their own, so we need to treat them to get rid of them.

Some parasites can be transmitted from dogs to humans. Good handwashing and sanitation are the best ways to avoid that, but children are not always perfect when they wash their hands before they eat, which is why we make sure that your dog does not have any parasites to can't be transmitted to anybody.

Yeah, we want everybody in the household - every dog and cat - on some type of preventative or some kind of medication to make sure that the dogs and cats and the family members are not exposed to any parasites.

We have a combination of oral medication and topical medications. It depends on the situation, but for the most part, we want every dog on Sentinel, which is a once-monthly pill you give your dog to prevent roundworms, hookworm, or whipworms, flea infestations, and heartworms. And then we have some topical medications; at the Drake Center, we also use Bravecto, a pill that kills fleas for three months and ticks for three months. Ticks have encroached on just about every community in the United States now, and we do not want dogs being exposed to ticks because they transmit diseases. Not to mention, they can infest your house too. We don't want that happening, so we recommend Sentinel and Bravecto, pills to prevent and then treat any possible infestation with fleas or ticks.

We do an exam when we're vaccinating your cat to ensure that your cat looks healthy enough to receive vaccines. If the kitten is not healthy, we don't want to make them feel worse by giving them a vaccine. As veterinarians, we're a bit more in tune with making sure that they're healthy enough to receive the vaccines. But then we also do other things, like making sure that they don't have any intestinal parasites or diseases that could be transmitted from cat to cat. And that's going to be a critical factor. Lastly, a vaccine like rabies can only be administered by a licensed veterinarian.