Slugs remain a prolific pest in the garden, and their damage can extend far beyond destroying your flowers and vegetables, as they can carry the lungworm parasite that can cause serious health problems in dogs and can be fatal if not diagnosed and treated.
Some dogs deliberately eat the parasites, but they can also be ingested from foraging in undergrowth, eating grass, carrying around outside toys such as balls and rubber bones, and when the parasites have attached themselves to outside water and food bowls. They can also simply stick to dogs’ coats.
To provide your dog with the safest of environments while in the garden, it is vital to try and remove the threat of the lungworm parasite, and one of the most effective ways of doing this is removing slugs from the garden.
Until now, most slug control methods, such as blue pellets, have been identified as being potentially harmful to dogs and other household pets. The biological nematodes used in Nemaslug, on the other hand, seek out and destroy slugs, and only slugs, and can be used safe in the knowledge that they will cause no harm to anything else in your garden, including your dog. In fact, nematodes are so safe they can even be kept in your own fridge.
Also, unlike alternative pest control solutions, nematodes can be used as a preventative control, so even if you are lucky enough to have not seen any slugs yet, treating the garden to a dose of nematodes will keep the critters at bay before they become a real problem.
“Lungworm can be a devastating disease for dogs. We believe that by using nematodes to protect your garden against slugs, you are also protecting your dogs from lungworm at the same time,” says Gavin Wood from BASF. “This biological pest control is fast and effective, and is simply watered on to plants and soil where slugs may be present.”
TV Vet Marc Abraham (‘Marc the Vet’) explains: “Lungworm relies greatly on slug and snail hosts in order to grow and develop, and it’s from ingesting these (or even just licking their trails or infected water from bowls left outside) that disease transmission may occur. So the more contact our dogs have with infected slugs and snails, the more likely this often fatal disease is rapidly spread.”
All Nemasys products can be ordered online, with an entire season’s worth being ordered and sent out as and when needed. This means all your planning can be done now, and you can concentrate of planting and growing, safe in the knowledge that your pest control is taken care of.