Services

As well as caring for your pets with injury or illness, we place a strong emphasis on preventative care.

We provide services such as health and wellness check ups and provide a wide range of products to aid in the health of your pet. We stock a complete range of both premium and prescription dietary foods.

Our staff are always happy to offer advice regarding products such as worming, flea prevention, shampoos and nutrition. Information leaflets on a variety of topics are freely available from the surgery, including puppy and kitten care, vaccination, desexing and diet information and flea control suggestions.

All your pets records are kept on our computer system, and can be accessed as the push of a button. As we know life gets busy we send regular reminders for services such as health checks, heartworm prevention, desexing, senior health checks and blood tests.

We recommend you consider desexing between the ages of 6-12 months old; before your pet becomes sexually active, or feels the urge to roam and/or mark territory.

Desexing is a day surgery procedure with minimal after care involved. Your pet will require rest for several days after the surgery, and will need to have the sutures removed after 10-14 days. This also gives us the opportunity to check the surgery site and ensure it is healing well. We perform all our surgery under strict sterile conditions in a fully equipped operating theatre, using modern anaesthetics and monitoring equipment. Antibiotics and pain relief are administered routinely with each surgery.

Advantages
Desexing the male removes the urge for behaviour such as roaming to seek females in season, reduces aggression (particularly with other males), marking territory (whether indoors or out) and can help prevent problems such as testicular cancer and prostate enlargement.
Desexing the female prevents her from coming into season; thus attracting unwanted male dog attention, and means she cannot have any unwanted litters or false pregnancies. Research has shown that desexing a female before she has her first season greatly reduces the risk of mammary tumours, and removes the risk of uterine infections.

Fallacies
It is a common fallacy that a desexed animal will become fat and lazy. As most animals are desexed at 6 months old or thereabouts, this is also a time when their food intake should be reduced, so the real reason for weight gain is the same as non-desexed animal eg. overfeeding.

Remember that all service animals, Guide dogs, Hearing dogs and dogs for the Disabled are routinely desexed. Desexing will not change your pets' character, although as mentioned above it can help reduce unwanted behaviour.

Our surgery is performed in a fully equipped operating theatre with modern equipment and medications. Our anaesthetic machines run with a safe inhalation anasesthetic. Each anaestheitic is tailored to your pet's specific needs, with special consideration for the procedure being performed.

Your pet will be monitored and cared for by the Veterinarinan and a Qualified Experienced Veterinary Nurse at all times. Our modern monitoring equipment measures parameters such as your pet's heart and respiratory rates and status, blood oxygen concentration, blood pressure and echocardiogram.

Your pet will recover in a comfortable bed where they are continued to be monitored until they are able to go home. All patients are provided with analgesic - a common painkiller - to ensure their recovery is pain free.

Radiology

Our radiology machine provides excellent quality radiographs which assist in the diagnosis of illness and disease, as well as radiographs to be assessed for hip and elbow dysplasia.

Ultrasonography

Frequently used for confirming pregnancies and for disease diagnosis, our ultrasound machine is also an important tool in diagnostics.

In House Laboratory

Our Idexx laboratory gives us the opportunity to perform tests including complete blood cell count, biochemistry, electrolyte levels and thyroid function. We also perform testing for diseases such as Canine Heartworm and Parvovirus, and Feline Infectious Viraemia.

Other tests including urinalysis and the examination of slides using a high-powered microscope are also frequently performed. The in-house laboratory offers very rapid test results, which is very important with critically ill patients. It is also used for routine monitoring and pre-anaesthetic blood testing.

Did you know that studies have shown 80% of dogs and 70% of cats suffer from dental disease by the age of three? Tooth disease is the most common disease seen in pets, and if your pet has bad breath, it probably has dental disease. Dental disease can cause irreversible damage, and can affect organs other than teeth, and some breeds of dogs and cats are more prone to dental disease.

Yearly check ups ensure any problems are detected early. If your pet has a build-up of tartar or plaque on their teeth the only way to effectively remove it is by manual descaling. In order to do this your pet will undergo a general anaesthetic in our modern surgery suite, and the plaque will be removed with our ultrasonic descaler.

There are many products available to prevent the build up of plaque on your pet's teeth, before the problem begins or following manual cleaning. These include special dry foods, chews and pet toothpaste and brushes.

Microchipping involves placing an implant under your pet's skin between its shoulder-blades. The chip is about the size of a grain of rice, and contains your pet's individual identification number. This number is recorded in a database with all your details. Should your pet go missing, all vets and animal shelters now have scanners which can read the microchip number.

It is a bit like the barcode reader at the supermarket! It is then easy for your pet to be identified and returned to you as soon as possible.

If we microchip your pet at the same time they are undergoing a general anaesthetic (such as for desexing) we can also place a tattoo in their right ear to show they have a microchip implant.

We now use Thermal Microchips which allow us to take your pet's temperature without the use of a thermometer. Using a microchip scanner, we can detect your pet's core body temperature. This is a time saver and a nice added bonus to the standard microchip.