Friday 5 February 2021
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The Weekend Sun
The Bay’s Biggest Losers
tauranga papamoa village katikati te puna
Three Bay of Plenty pets have been crowned the ‘Biggest Losers’ after beating out some tough competition at Tauranga, Te Puna, Katikati, Papamoa Village Vets’ inaugural healthy weight loss program.
“The program was initiated by a couple of our staff who noticed that most days they interacted with clients who own pets that are overweight. “We wanted to create a campaign that was open for clients that are new to the weight loss process but also for clients that have been struggling with Tauranga clinic lead nurse weight management for a Jaimee Roelofs says the period of time,” says Jaimee. program was a great success The program was free for and it was awesome to see all new and existing clients, so many clients seeing great involved initial and post results with their pets once program weigh ins, photos, they knew how to make a education and plenty of positive impact. incentives along the way. “We’ve had lots of With the inaugural comments from clients saying campaign being a great that they have seen definite success, plans will be made improvements in their pet’s to repeat it later this year, so activity levels,” she says. Biggest Loser, Scruffy, before and after. if your pet is a little on the For two weeks at the end of heavy side, watch this space! 2020, clients of cats and dogs participating in the Grand prize winners were ‘Rusty’ Hamlet, a cat program were educated on healthy weight loss for from Katikati, ‘Scruffy’ Vazey, a dog from Te Puna, their animals, which was monitored with regular and ‘Leo’ Morris, a cat from Tauranga. weigh-ins.
The importance of vaccinations Vaccinations can be a wonderful tool to help hepatitis, canine cough and leptospirosis and for cats the cat flu viruses as well as panleukopenia prevent disease.
Like all medication, we always want to be sure that we minimise risk when using them and although vaccine reactions are rare, we aim to use as few vaccines as possible to get the greatest immunity. A vaccination is a means of giving the body a much less severe form of a disease than it could potentially contract which primes the immune system to be prepared for the disease so that the animal doesn’t become ill when exposed to the real thing. Any vaccine is only as good as the host’s response to it and this requires an animal to have a healthy immune system. The main vaccines that we use for dogs protect against parvo-virus, distemper,
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which can be deadly. For some of these diseases, research has shown that vaccines have a much longer term of effectiveness against disease than previously thought. Subsequently, recommendations on the frequency of vaccination boosters can be as long as three years and for some diseases we can do a blood test called a titre test to check that your pet is protected rather than blindly vaccinate. Vaccination has its place and can be life-saving but it’s important to consider each animal’s needs, weighing up their risks and their owner’s / guardian’s preferences.