Vaccinations

As a breeder, I have dealt with two vets.  Both have recognized that I am a "cat rancher" interested in the best care of my critters.  I do still miss my vet in Conroe whose wife wanted me to go to vet school and take over the practice.  I think of Dr. Turner and hear "Seas two feet" in  the weather guru voice because he loved to fish, and I swear I bought him a new boat.  I also remember that he sat me down in the waiting room with vet textbooks to read about the impossible diagnosis when my beloved pet Orson was diagnosed with pancreatitis.  I don't want to digress into my tears for Orson (who was the Best Cat EVER), who died in my arms.

Because my point is: vets.  Vets who treat me like I know something about cats and the vets of the kittens and cats I sell who portray me as the devil incarnate out to make a buck.

Would I like to make a buck?  Sure.  You bet.The   I'd like to support my cats.  They eat.  I don't make enough money to make my house and car payments.  Thanks to the generous donations of TICA friends, I can feed the porch cats who can't live in houses.

So here's the thing:  I have kept shot records in many forms.  I vaccinate the kittens at 8 and 12 weeks and record the vaccination.  I have written it down; I have pasted the label from the vaccine bottle; I sometimes scribble notes now knowing that this information will be rejected.  And in any form, it is rejected by many vets.

No matter what I do, the vets find this information questionable and vaccinate the kittens/cats all over again.

This bothers me.  Not because they are questioning my integrity.  My integrity is questionable: I am human; humans lie.  It bothers me because of vaccine related carcinomas.  

The AVMA came out with new vaccine protocols many years ago that I have been following.  Previously, kittens were vaccinated at 6, 8 and 10 weeks (to the best of my recall; I may be wrong). Last I read, to avoid sarcomas due to over-vaccination,  the AVMA recommendations are 8 and 12 weeks.  That's what I do.

Kittens get a natural immunity from the mother's milk which begins to wear off.  Some breeders do an early intra-nasal vaccine which includes drops in the eyes.  I tried it.  I couldn't do it.  I got painful eye-drops as a child, and still cringe at eye-drops for my cats.  (In fact, I try them all out on my own eyes to see if they will hurt.)  These vaccines are painful.  Do the kittens get over it? Probably.  But I don't.

The natural immunity begins to wear off as the mother weans the kittens.  Old school weaning was at six weeks.  (Breeders will cringe here because breeders know that this is like saying a baby human is viable when it starts to eat solid food...Really?  You'd leave a toddler alone to survive?)  

You can get a six week old kitten.  I have.  Nellie the Psycho Princess was six weeks old when I rescued her from the mother of a teenage girl who had that mothering instinct gone wrong.  (For me, it was mourning doves.)  You can tell from her name how well that worked out.

We now know that a healthy weaning age is between 10-12 weeks old.  That's weaning as in taking the kitten away from the mom.  At 8 weeks, the kitten is likely eating more than nursing, and so needs the vaccination.  At 12 weeks, the kitten is ready to go into a new environment and needs extra immunity.  Why? Polio, people.  Vaccinations work.  They are good.  Too many, not so much.

The reason the AVMA came out with the "new protocol" in the 1990's was to prevent vaccine related sarcomas.  Yet HSUS and PETA have these vets believing that breeders are evil, churning out kittens for a profit, so they vaccinate kittens and cats all over again even though evidence shows that sarcomas are caused by over-vaccination.

I love my babies.  I do.