11/06/2026
🆘⚠️🐶🐱LAST CHANCE TODAY to make a real difference in improving our waterways, reducing environmental contamination and safeguarding the health of your family.
The government closes its consultation TONIGHT at 11:59pm to address the presence of chemicals from flea and tick treatments in rivers and streams across the UK. You can help ensure that wildlife is protected by any future decisions on these chemicals.
Even if you have 30 seconds to spare, you can still help by just ticking. 'strongly agree' in question 15. You can help change legislation by just doing this.
Just imagine if people couldn't just buy these eco-toxic spot-ons over the counter on a whim in the chemist or supermarket and had to buy them from the vets, with proper advice on their impact. This consultation could lead to that happening and it could be the starting point of real change in tackling this crazy world of preventative treatment for a problem we don't even know is there, all driven by a money-making machine that puts your health, your pet's health and the health of the environment well behind financial profit.
Here's the consultation:
https://consult.defra.gov.uk/vmd-policy-development-and-delivery-office/call-for-evidence-fipronil-imidacloprid/consultation/subpage.2026-02-18.1154172178/
Here's some of our lengthy response to question 16 - feel free to copy and use bits as you wish:
We speak to 10,000-15,000 members of the public about this topic each year, including over 2,000 schoolchildren. We have educational signs on this topic next to all the ponds on the visitor trail at The Bug Farm visitor attraction. In the last two years, fewer than 10 people that we spoke to were aware of an environmental impact of pet parasiticides, and most of these were small animal vets. None were aware of the impacts of some of these active ingredients on the cognitive ability of autistic children nor the risk to unborn children.
Therefore, the general public are not in a position to accurately assess risk and make an informed choice on the safe use of these parasiticides and yet they are able to buy them and use them in their homes.
Only this small number of people who were aware of the wider issue were aware that these actives are excreted through the skin of their pet; some for over a month post-treatment. Therefore, they were not aware that they should not let their pets swim in ponds, rivers or the sea for at least a month after treatment. They were also unaware of how the parasiticides can get into water when they wash their pet's bedding, stroke their pet and wash their hands or wash their hands after treating their pet. They did not know that most water bodies in the UK now contain these parasiticides at levels toxic to invertebrates. They were not aware that, due to these issues, these parasiticides have been banned in agriculture.
In any risk assessment, this level of risk would be deemed inappropriate.
If the general public can not accurately assess risk to themselves, their families and the environment due to a lack of knowledge, they should not be able to purchase these parasiticides. We have also seen a lack of knowledge about environmental impacts of parasiticides more generally from SQP's. All advice we have been given by SQP's has been from a parasite control perspective. None have been able to answer questions on which product should be used to reduce environmental impact.
Following on from my doctorate on the topic of the environmental impact of livestock parasiticides, I created Dung Beetles Direct in 2012 to help fill this gap and provide advice to farmers and horse owners on sustainable parasiticide usage. Over the last 13 years, our fact sheets have been extremely well received, shared and used across the UK. We will now create similar education materials for pet parasiticides.
There is a superb opportunity here for vets to educate pet owners on the responsible use of parasiticides at the time of purchase. More than this, there is a significant opportunity to educate pet owners about whether they really need to treat in the first place. Personally speaking, after two years of faecal egg counting our own three dogs, we have had to treat one dog with a parasiticide twice. By knowing which parasite was present, we were able to target treatment with a more specific and less environmentally-harmful parasiticide.
We should be focussing on monitoring (with combs) for external parasites and testing (faecal egg counts) for internal parasites as the go-to rather than prophylactic treatment. We should also be advising treating with oral tablets, where required and picking up faeces for a defined time post-treatment. It is a simple message to spread and a simple action to put in place. The question we should all be asking ourselves, at a regulatory, vet and owner level is: Why are we not doing this already?
However, this opportunity to educate pet owners about sustainable parasiticide usage is only possible if these active ingredients cannot be bought over the counter elsewhere. It is also only possible if the current preventative health plan veterinary model, driven by profit, changes to a test-first approach. When many veterinary practices are now owned by the companies who sell the parasiticides, there will always be a conflict of interest that must be addressed at the regulatory level. Therefore, we must move to a financially viable model where the practices are able to provide a regular parasite monitoring service with an equivalent profit margin to selling the parasiticides - otherwise, change will only happen in the smaller independent practices despite individual vets in non-independent practices wanting change. Changing consumer behaviour to pay for testing rather than a physical treatment also requires significant behavioural change. We need funding to drive this to make it appealing to both veterinary practiced and pet owners. In our current project, we are trialing subsidising these tests in order to drive this much-needed behavioural shift. However, a long-term solution needs to be implemented across the UK.
There are some vets doing some great work in this area, for example: https://chalklandvets.co.uk/2025/02/21/our-new-green-health-plan-test-and-assess/
Buglife provide some great info at: https://www.buglife.org.uk/campaigns/veterinary-medicines/veterinary-medicines-consultation/
Their full report, linked to on this page is a really shocking and important read.
