The Wildflowers will not be vaccinated for anything before they leave for their new homes.
Am I an Anti-Vaxxer? Absolutely Not!
They won’t be vaccinated because a vaccine would not work and it would create a 2 - 3 weeks window of risk for the puppies.
Let me explain.
A single vaccination is all that is needed to provide protection to a puppy. We typically do a series simply because we are not certain when the vaccination will “work” — and that is because puppies arrive with their mother’s antibodies, which both protect puppies from the disease(s) but also “block” the vaccination.
We checked Daisy’s antibodies before the puppies were born using the Canine Nomograph. The results showed that the earliest the puppies would respond to a Distemper vaccine is nine weeks and the soonest they will respond to a Parvo vaccine is 15 weeks.
A vaccination at eight weeks, therefore, would would be ineffective because of high levels of maternal antibodies.
But starting at about nine weeks, the puppies won’t have maternal antibodies against Distemper and the window of disease risk is wide open.
If we vaccinated at eight weeks, the puppy would not have a second vaccination — one that would work for Distemper — until 11 or 12 weeks. Therefore, from about nine weeks until 11 - 12 weeks, the puppy would be unprotected from Distemper.
A typical vaccination schedule is 8, 12, and 16 weeks. If such a schedule were utilized with the Wildflowers, the first one would be useless and represent an unnecessary vaccine burden, the second one would be effective against Distemper but useless for Parvo, and the third one should protect for Parvo and would be unnecessary for Distemper.
Extra or unnecessary vaccinations are not a good plan — we should minimize as we can. That will be a conversation for another day — the Wildflowers have a busy day of visiting and we need to get started.
EVENING: Photos from the day and VIDEO (click the word video).
This is the Wildflowers’ outside play area…
Mariposa
How many visitors do you see?
Sit-down nursing is now a thing…
Paintbrush and Mallow…
Lupine…
Eden Jonas is here and we spent the day evaluating puppies and visiting — Suzanne joined us for some of the time. The stacking practice paid off — this is Paintbrush…
Good Night, Friends!