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.

I would recommend waiting until they have that last vaccine series with their rabies because that's going to be the way they're going to contract it—from wildlife outside, but hopefully, they never do. But to make sure that they're fully protected, I would wait until they finish out their full vaccine series.

Depending on what vaccine they miss and where they are in their series, we can get them back on track appropriately; it just varies as to what was missed and when.

We tend to see sometimes that they can be a little sore at the injection site. It's not uncommon—if you go to get your annual flu shot or any other vaccine and your arms are a little sore for a day, so we can notice that. Sometimes they can be a little sleepy too. Vaccines drain you of your energy for 24 hours, and those are some things that we can notice, but for the most part, I don't feel like I ever have owners feel like they have a concern.

I recommend it, even if they're indoor only. If you ever bring another cat into your home in the future, or if they were to get outside, or your situation were to change down the road, we want to make sure that we set their immune system up right. I recommend that all kittens get those core vaccines.

So every veterinarian is going to have their own. We have some nationwide guidelines that we use to help us out. But my personal vaccine schedule is to start their first and second visit with their feline distemper vaccine, and then their third and fourth visit; we do that feline distemper, along with their feline leukemia vaccine. We then update them on their rabies vaccine that last visit. We do that because they have to be a certain age to receive rabies, but it's such a great vaccine that they only need to have that vaccine once; it doesn't need to be boostered.

I like to start vaccines between that six and eight weeks of age, as that's kind of the ideal place to start. But that doesn't mean that if you get a cat and they're a little bit older, like three or four months, that we can't start their vaccine series there. Or even if they're eight or nine months, there is a series that we need to go through for any age of kitten. But that perfect window is when they're six to eight weeks of age.