29/12/2025
May you never experience severe medical complications or death of a loved one, especially anything that could have been prevented by vaccination.
Another breeder recently shared a post about why they don’t vaccinate their puppies prior to placing them at eight weeks of age, and I had to respond. I wanted to share my comments here as well, because I find the celebration of anti-vaccine sentiments online to be, frankly, alarming.
MDA (maternally derived antibodies) wane at different rates. Having seen puppies die of both parvo and distemper when I worked in shelters and at a pet store that sold puppies, it’s not a risk I’m personally willing to take. Vaccination is NOT a sure thing at this age, but serial vaccines are currently the safest option we have.
WSAVA guidelines discuss MDA in detail, and still recommend beginning vaccination between 6-8 weeks for potentially lethal diseases.
https://wsava.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/WSAVA-Vaccination-guidelines-2024.pdf
The AAHA guidelines also recommend at least three serial vaccinations starting as early as six weeks of age, due to MDA. The fact that national and international guidelines agree on this approach as the SAFEST option to combat MDA is enough for me.
https://www.aaha.org/resources/2022-aaha-canine-vaccination-guidelines/
Ultimately, vaccines are a drop in the bucket of the total insults to an immature immune system that puppies deal with on a daily or even hourly basis. We should be breeding dogs whose immune systems are robust enough to deal with vaccines, as well as dogs whose immune systems can thrive on any foods, who don’t suffer from seasonal or other allergies, and who can generally exist in our world without systemic or atopic reactions to common triggers.
In a world where the science is clear that vaccination of both people and pets saves lives, it’s alarming how often anti-vaccine sentiments are celebrated. Of course, you can cherry-pick articles that will show that vaccination at six weeks, as recommended by experts, is not fully effective. No one’s arguing that a single vaccine at six weeks is sufficient for long term immunity. But if you’re not doing nomographs to determine timing, then you need to either roll the dice with when your MDA will wane sufficiently for your puppy’s immune system to respond adequately, or you need to limit socialization to a potentially harmful extent in a puppy whose developmental windows are rapidly closing. If I weren’t vaccinating young puppies, I certainly wouldn’t be taking them off site multiple times a week.
As a puppy buyer, I’m frankly not interested in getting a puppy from a breeder who’s not doing the important work of introducing car rides, off-campus socialization in public, and crating/being in a pen in new locations. That, substrate preference for elimination, ENS, sound habituation, and complete, breed-appropriate health testing of the parents are the bare minimum I expect from a conscientious breeder. But in order to lower the risk to the best of our abilities, vaccines also need to be a piece of the puzzle (as well as understanding and mitigating risks by not letting puppies walk in areas where unvaccinated dogs are likely to have eliminated, using shoe dips or having visitors remove their shoes, etc.).
Pictured: Addie at one of her puppy classes. This one takes place in a vet clinic lobby.
