Your Pet Will Be Susceptible to Detrimental and Fatal Diseases
Whether you like it or not, your pet will be more vulnerable to various viruses. It doesn’t matter if they are indoor pets. These microscopic assassins enter your home and find their way to your pets. If you don’t protect your pets with vaccines, you will be putting them at risk of contracting diseases. Since they don’t have activated antibodies to fight off infections, they would only be left to deteriorate. Fatal results usually follow. If dogs aren’t vaccinated at a young age, they will be vulnerable to diseases such as rabies, canine distemper, hepatitis, canine parvovirus, Lyme disease, canine influenza, leptospirosis, and kennel cough. If cats do not receive their shots during kittenhood, they will most likely contract feline calicivirus, rabies, feline distemper, feline viral rhinotracheitis, feline leukemia, chlamydia, and kennel cough.
Over the years, I’ve collected research documents to help me make decisions about my dogs’ husbandry, and to share what I’ve learnt with other dog lovers. I also hoped that vets would take notice of the research, and stop over-vaccinating. All medical interventions come with a risk – even the humble aspirin can be deadly. So you have to do a risk/benefit analysis whenever you consider medications. What, then, are the risks of vaccines?
According to Dr Larry Glickman and his team at Purdue University, serum and foreign proteins in vaccines can cause autoimmunity (i.e. cancer, leukaemia, organ failure, etc.). This research also indicates that genetic damage is possible, since vaccinated dogs developed autoantibodies to attack their own DNA. Research from the University of Geneva echoes this finding.
According to the Intervet data sheet, dogs will develop permanent immunity to hepatitis over the age of 12 weeks. So why keep vaccinating against that? Kennel cough is easily treated in most cases, and the vaccine isn’t very effective. So what’s the point? Leptospirosis is rare (my vet tells me he hasn’t seen it in ten years, either), and the vaccine is associated with some of the worst adverse reactions. Isn’t this vaccine an unacceptable risk, then? And parvovirus is – according to the Concise Oxford Veterinary Dictionary – rarely a problem for the normal healthy adult dog.
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Years ago, I was the typical ‘responsible’ dog owner. My four Golden Retrievers were vaccinated every year, and they were fed a ‘complete and balanced’ pet food, recommended by my vet. The red carpet was metaphorically rolled out once a fortnight, each time I visited with a dog suffering from chronic disease. Eventually the problems became more serious: my dogs started to die years before their time.
Why is more than one dose of vaccine given to pups?
There are two reasons. First, without complicated testing it is impossible to know when a pup has lost the passive protection it gets from its mother. An early decline in a puppys maternal antibody can leave it susceptible to infection at a very young age. A strong maternal immunity can actually interfere with early vaccination (see handout “Vaccination Failure in Dogs”). Second, particularly with killed vaccines, the first dose is a priming dose, and the second dose boosts the response to a higher, longer-lasting level of immunity.