Typically, it is very safe. Rarely, we have dogs who have vaccine reactions, which are allergic reactions to vaccines. That's not typically associated with getting more vaccines at once but to a specific vaccine. If a dog does have a vaccine reaction, we may split up the vaccines in the future to try to determine which vaccine they are sensitive to. But we typically do multiple vaccines per visit and the dogs do very well.

Because it's their first experience with the vaccine, puppies need to get boosters of most of our vaccines. Some vaccines require more boosters, some require fewer, but we're going to work out that vaccine schedule with you when we meet your dog.

Typically, adult dogs need to come in once a year for vaccines. Not every vaccine needs to be boostered every year. Once you've gotten the initial rabies and distemper series onboard, we booster these every three years. But annual vaccinations are for Lyme, leptospirosis, Bordatella, and canine influenza. So you should expect to bring your dog in once a year for vaccines. When they're puppies, they're getting brand new vaccines more frequently for boosters.

Typically, we start vaccinating puppies of eight weeks of age. And if you get a new dog from a shelter, then sometimes they have vaccines, but sometimes they don't have all the vaccines that we would typically recommend. So we ask you to, at the very least send us your vaccine record so we can tell you whether your dog is up to date, but you should be bringing them in to see us when you first get them anyway. You’ll want to do this so we can make sure that they're healthy and we can always review their vaccines and see if there are any additional ones that we recommend for our area.

If you want to treat intestinal parasites, do things like making sure that you pick up the feces in your dog's yard so that if they did have a parasite that they don't reinfest themselves. Make sure that they don't get into other dogs’ feces, particularly at a dog park. As far as fleas and ticks, you want to use your preventives, but you want to keep your dog nicely groomed, and check on him a lot. Ensure that even when you have your preventatives, you look at them from time to time and make sure that they don't have any parasites on them. One way to avoid ticks is not going in the areas where tall grass is because that's where the ticks are. You want to be careful that you just avoid those areas whenever ticks are out, which in Maryland is usually during the spring, the summer, the fall, and early winter, so almost all of the months of the year in Maryland.

You can. OTC products are probably safe, but we're not sure they're very effective. The medications that we use here—predominantly Interceptor, Credelio, and Bravecto—are medications that have had an extreme amount of research and safety studies and gone through the process of going through the FDA to ensure they are effective. That's the products that I would use.