What is Preventative Care? Everything You Need to Know for Pets

Preventative care is something that doesn’t quite fit inside the realm of pet insurance, but it can be covered by an add-on package that works to help save you money and keep your pet healthy. This powerful tool can help to make sure your pet lives a happy, healthy, and full life. But what is preventative care, and what do you need to know about it? 

Here is everything you need to know about what preventive care is and if it is an investment that you should make for your pet.

Is Pet Insurance the Same As Preventative Care?

Perhaps the best way to talk about what preventative care is is to talk about what it is not. Pet insurance and preventive care are two separate things. While you can find preventive care coverage through pet insurances, this is typically different based on how the policies are written. 

What is Pet Insurance?

Pet insurance is a service that works like most insurance companies where you pay a premium for a set amount of coverage over specific conditions. Pet insurance may be a new concept to some people who are either new pet owners, or long-time pet owners, but it can be acquired at any stage in a pet’s life.

Factors like species, breed, age, and preexisting conditions can affect a pet’s premium rates, however, the investment into pet insurance more than pays for itself. Treatments for emergency situations, illness, or accidents are just expensive. Some of these treatments, depending on the situation, can range upwards of thousands of dollars. In fact, the average family will spend over $16,000 on their pet dog over the span of its lifetime. 

These expenses build up over time and can be quite high. Having pet insurance represents a small investment in comparison. The sad truth is that there are times when a pet needs a treatment that is simply cost-prohibitive. There are also situations where your fur baby may need to stay the night, or more than one, in the animal hospital to get the observation and care that it needs. With pet insurance, these procedures and treatments aren’t cost-prohibitive.

This not only gives your four-legged friends access to the health care they need when they need it - but it supplies you with peace of mind knowing the treatment is accessible. 

What is Preventative Care

Preventative care is a powerful tool that works to help keep your animal companion healthy and doesn’t focus on treatment and intervention, but instead on preventative measures. These preventive measures are powerful tools that help to not only keep your pet healthy through the year but provide greater insight into diagnostics for your pet’s provider. 

Annual Wellness Exams

Annual checkups are one part of a preventive health care plan. This does a couple of things, first, it helps to get your vet checked once a year for illness or disease. Secondly, it builds a baseline to help with diagnosing illness if it occurs. Certain animals, like cats, can actually hide their sickness quite effectively. So having a regular relationship with a veterinarian and documented baseline for health, can help a provider find and diagnose quickly, and effectively.  

Blood Work

Blood work is one of the best ways to check for the presence of heat worms and tick disease. Any pet owner can tell you, one of the greatest risks your fur baby will run is the chance of getting heartworms. These parasites can cause big health problems for your four-legged companion, and while there are treatments to help correct damage, having regular blood work drawn is a powerful way of keeping them healthy. It helps improve diagnostics, and can catch a condition before it becomes severe!

Fecal Test

A fecal (poop) test checks for the presence of intestinal worms and this also can act as a powerful way to keep in check what could potentially become a serious illness for your pet. 

Conclusion 

Annual preventive care can be expensive. Blood work, fecal testing, annual wellness exams as well as vaccines and shots all add up. It’s estimated that a pet owner, depending on the region, pet type, and breed could spend from $700 to $1500 a year in preventive care alone. 

Preventive care works to help keep your pet healthy, and provide for early detection of serious problems so you can find them before they develop into unnecessary complications. With proper preventive care, your pet can get the diagnosis and treatment it needs to live a healthy, strong life. While some pet insurance companies may not cover this in their policy, you can typically find it as an add-on service that works at a flat rate that covers a set amount of annual preventative care treatments and is well worth the investment.