A few years ago, our dog, Chloe, suddenly and mysteriously started losing control of her hind-quarters. She would fall over. Or trip on a step. She always looked a bit baffled by this, like she couldn’t quite figure out why her body wasn’t cooperating. We returned to our vet, who was equally baffled. We decided to wait it out and see if it improved.
In the meantime, I shared Chloe’s plight with a dog-loving friend who was increasingly interested in holistic and natural rearing of dogs. She was active on a Web-based “dog” board and had been fielding a lot of questions related to dog behaviour and health issues. The more she dug, the more she became convinced that the culprit (or one of them) was over-vaccination of dogs.
She asked me if the symptoms presented themselves roughly three months after Chloe’s rabies vaccination. Yep. Seemed consistent with other stories she was hearing. She continued to research (did I mention this friend is a PhD candidate? Research is her raison d’être.) and was alarmed by her findings, which she talks about at length in a blog post on her own site.

In the meantime, we’ve discussed vaccinations with our vet and opted out of vaccinating our 20-year-old cat, a decision our vet supports wholeheartedly. But with an eight-week-old puppy and a new kitten, we’ve got some serious thinking to do. For our older dogs, the answer seems clear.