10 Ways to Help Your Pet Live Longer and Save You a Bunch of Money on Vet Bills at the Same Time!
So far, this series of blog posts have covered:
#1 – Have a financial plan to cover the costs of veterinary care
#2 – Have a thorough physical done every year
#3 – Feed really good food
Our next topic is a bit more controversial!
#4 Vaccinate Only for What Your Pet Really Needs and Only as Often as
Necessary!
Some historians say the first vaccinations used on humans may have been as far back as 1000 A.D. in China, the Middle East and Africa while Edward Jenner’s development of the smallpox vaccination in the late 1700s brought immunizations into widespread use. Today we have vaccinations for a variety of viral and bacterial diseases in cats and dogs and countless lives have been saved and much suffering has been prevented through their use.
Vaccines, administered to your pet by injection, intranasally or orally, work by stimulating their body’s production of infection-fighting antibodies against the particular disease without making them sick. These antibodies persist in the pet for varying lengths of time at which point a booster vaccine needs to be given for protection to continue. Thus, not every vaccination we give to your pet has to be boosted every year. Current scientific wisdom has us giving some vaccination boosters yearly and some every 3 years, but this may change as better information on the duration of vaccines is brought to light.
Additionally, depending on their lifestyle, not every cat or dog will be exposed to every disease for which there is an available vaccine. Because of this, and because any vaccination can have some negative side effects, we believe that each of your pets should be evaluated individually to determine which vaccinations it needs and this evaluation should be repeated every year to see if risk factors have changed!
Vaccinations are an essential part of keeping your pet healthy! Information you give us about their age, lifestyle and risk factors will help us custom-design a vaccination program for each of your pets!