I am getting ready to order more flea and tick medication for our dog, but I have a question about dosing.

I just took her to the vet for her annual last week and her weight was up a little so she is now on a diet and getting more exercise to lose 10 pounds. She has been on Frontline Plus, but we are switching her over to Advantix. Because our dog gained some weight she bumped up into a new weight category for the dosage, but after she loses the 10 pounds she will be back at the upper end of the lower weight dosage. Would it be ok to go ahead and give her the lower dosage or would it not work properly even though she is over the weight limit by less than 10 pounds? I know these prevention medications are poison and I am concerned with her being so close to the weight cut-off that I might be over-dosing her if I give her the heavier dose, especially after she loses the weight. I wish I had thought about ordering yesterday so I could have called the vet when I realized that she was in a new weight category, but since I didn't I hope someone here will know the answer. TIA

By Mrs_B on Saturday, August 9, 2008 - 12:32 pm:

I would stick to the new weight category to make sure the product actually works. You wouldn't want to fork out money for nothing.

With our Mastiff, we bought a 6 month supply of Frontline for her. At the time she was 28 pounds. We knew within a month or so she would be in the next weight range of the 45-88 pound dosing. So what my vet did was looked at the difference between the boxes. The 45-88 pound dosing had 2.68ml of product in each applicator. The 22-44 pound package had exactly half that dosing. So for the first month I only applied half the dosing (I measured it out). Now she gets a full applicator of it since she's 60 pounds. But it saved us the initial loss of her outgrowing the product before we fully used it.

Maybe you could check the box of Advantix to see of you could do something like that as well. (And if your new weight category works like my Frontline does where it's 1/2 dose more per applicator, you could actually save money by getting two doses in one.)

By Yjja123 on Saturday, August 9, 2008 - 06:07 pm:

We use the advantick collar only. I highly recommend it over using the application methods.

By Tunnia on Saturday, August 9, 2008 - 07:14 pm:

Thanks for the opinions and if anyone else has an opinion on this I'd like to hear those too.