Anybody know where to get some cheap heartguard medicine?

My vet wants to charge me top dollar every time.

Just use 1% injectable Ivermectin. You dilute it and give to your dogs, orally once a month. It's the same as Heartguard. Do a little research online for the dosage. I don't like to tell people what to give their animals.

I’ve used ivermectin for prolly 30 years

hello
I've always used 1/10th cc for each 10 lbs. of dog. 1/2 cc = 50 lb. dog.
Liquid Ivermectin. Never had a problem or a heart worm.

Be sure to have your dog checked before you start any kind of preventative or treatment.

Scalebuster in point

Curious, what does a 6 month supply cost you for heartgard? There are some cheaper options out there.

Where do yall buy the ivermectin at?

Found some online at Tractor supply but its for horses.

Guessing I could use a dab of that no?

yes tractor supply is where i have bought it in the past - one bottle goes a long way

How much does your vet charge? Get him to price match or find a new vet. We pay $96-115 for a one year supply for 51-100lb dose. So $8-10 per month - pretty much nothing.

Contrary to what has been said above liquid Ivomec is NOT the same thing as heartgard. Heartgard also has a dewormer - pyrantel - in it. Straight ivermectin does not.

On top of that - if you don't know what you're doing you can make your dog very sick or kill it. Dose has to be right, some breeds (shepherds mainly) have a gene (MDR1) that makes them highly sensitive to it, and on top of that if your dog is heartworm positive and you don't know it - you can kill your dog giving straight liquid ivermectin.

Cheapest if you have many dogs is 1% liquid injectable given orally. Get it online and be sure it's fresh. If you don't have many dogs you won't use it all before it expires. The dose varies by what you are trying to do. .1cc per 10# monthly is standard for heartworms. That dose will kill other parasites too which you need to do so they don't develop resistance.

If just a couple dogs use horse wormer gel or paste. A beagle gets a pea sized wiped into its mouth while a coonhound gets a stripe as long as the first joint of your index finger.

You want products containing only ivermectin as active ingredient. If it contains other wormer you risk making that wormer ineffective by overuse.

I do not worm during winter. No point. Also all of these wormers are bad for the dogs. They're just better than the parasite. Use only when necessary.

Dogs can get heartworms in any month in Texas or just about anywhere in the US for that matter.

Possible where I am but unlikely. Doesn't matter because the ivomec will take care of it when i start giving of again early Spring. Literally no point in dosing when unnecessary.

Ok - sounds like you've got a handle on it.

To everyone else: I don't recommend following this advice. Ivermectin doesn't kill adult heartworms. Mosquitos are/can become active pretty much year round here in Texas. Skipping 3-4 months of preventative is an excellent way to give your dogs heartworms. A dose of Ivomec isn't going to cure your dog of heartworms after months of no prevention. It doesn't work like that. Rather than subject your hunting dogs/pets to heartworms disease - just treat year-round. It's cheap (regardless of what you use) insurance.

Yea that’s not correct. When I’ve had more sleep I’ll post the lifecycle of the heart worm and how prevention works.

Here's the lifecycle of the heartworm. Preventative only works in the early larval stages.

Texas, at least in most parts and Mississippi where I am now can have mosquitos year round. Prevention is way cheaper and easier on the dog than adulticide treatment. Trust me. I see multiple positive dogs a week. I've seen positives in dogs that missed one dose.

I'm a huge fan of Pro heart injections. 6 or 12 month. One injection and your dog is covered for 6 or 12 months. I use it on my own dogs cause I can't remember to give monthly meds.

https://d3ft8sckhnqim2.cloudfront.n...ife_Cycle_CLIENT_CLR_2020.pdf?1605567794

Here's the one for vets, it has a more definite time line on it.

https://d3ft8sckhnqim2.cloudfront.net/images/pdf/AHS_New_HW_Life_Cycle_VET_CLR_2020.pdf?1605567794

PLEASE PUT YOUR DOGS ON HEARTWORM PREVENTION YEAR ROUND. THEY DO NOT DISCRIMINATE AND THEY WILL KILL YOUR DOG.

Nonsense. Stop fearmongering to sell services people don't need. If you wanted more money you should have studied harder to get into med. school.

Where do you get that he's trying to sell something? He's giving an opinion and I appreciate the professional advice. I must have missed DVM after your name.

[/quote]

Nonsense. Stop fearmongering to sell services people don't need. If you wanted more money you should have studied harder to get into med. school.[/quote]


I'm sorry, which part is nonsense? Show me a scientific paper saying I'm wrong. it has nothing to do with money. I make plenty of money. I'm not making my living on heartworm prevention sales. But I had a dead dog in my hospital this morning from heartworm disease that I just couldn't get turned around.
If it was really just about the dollars for me, I'd never recommend heartworm prevention. All of the hospitalization and treatments required to save a clinically ill heartworm disease dog are much more expensive than selling you a year of prevention and a heartworm test.

Have you ever seen a dog in heart failure due to a huge worm burden? Or whats known as caval syndrome where we litterally go down the jugular vein with an instrument and pull adult heartworms from the heart in a last ditch effort to save a dogs life? I'm guessing no. I've been there. I've worked on these dogs. Heartworms aren't some myth made up by 'big pharma'.

I give Ivermectin. A $50 dollar bottle will last for a long long time. A developed heartworm can be affected by ivermectin. I took in a stray that had heartworms and was not going to pay for the treatment. My vet and I agreed on a plan for the dog. I was to dose it per pound as if it did not have a developed heartworm. The treatment would kill any future larva. The life of a heartworm is about 2 years. Some doctors have switched to not putting the dog through the heartworm treatment but rather make the worms so sick for the duration of their lives. So the monthly dose is killing the future larva and giving a good whackin to the adult worms. The rescue we used this on lived for another 10 years and died around 15 years old. The fear of this treatment is if the Ivermectin kills the adult worms all at once, the dead worms could wreak havoc on the dog's circulatory system, basically creating a stroke.

I've had a "breakthru" using heartguard as well. The dog survived, but was out of competition for most of a year.
I have since gone to the proheart 6 month injections. In my opinion the 12 month injections havent been out long enough to get a good evaluation.

Robby

I love proheart. The 12 is solid. It has been on market outside USA a lot longer than here. There’s definitely some ivermectin resistance in Heartworms. Especially in the Mississippi River valley.

We use sentinnal (sp?) but there has been a new one recently that covers more parasites...it's just more expensive, like 2x and we've used it but going back to Sentinnal...I think the new one is called Trifexis (sp?).

Our dogs are in the house, not in a kennel, so it treats fleas and other parasites...we aren't dealing with fleas and that's the big one for us in addition to the heartworms. PetMeds is typically cheaper and we normally ask the vet to match their price or we buy from PetMeds. Some vets do and some just can't.

+1 Since 2004.