Titer testing tests the level of antibodies to a given disease in the body. I don't believe that a lot of the titers have been validated to show that titer levels prove that your dog is protected, so we still do recommend following the American Animal Hospital Association vaccine schedule for canines. However, there are certain dogs who aren't able to get vaccines, such as dogs undergoing chemotherapy or who have had serious vaccine reactions, and in those cases, we may think about doing titers just as a measure of knowing how well we think they might be protected.

Typically, it is very safe. Rarely, we have dogs who have vaccine reactions, which are allergic reactions to vaccines. That's not typically associated with getting more vaccines at once but to a specific vaccine. If a dog does have a vaccine reaction, we may split up the vaccines in the future to try to determine which vaccine they are sensitive to. But we typically do multiple vaccines per visit and the dogs do very well.

Because it's their first experience with the vaccine, puppies need to get boosters of most of our vaccines. Some vaccines require more boosters, some require fewer, but we're going to work out that vaccine schedule with you when we meet your dog.

Typically, adult dogs need to come in once a year for vaccines. Not every vaccine needs to be boostered every year. Once you've gotten the initial rabies and distemper series onboard, we booster these every three years. But annual vaccinations are for Lyme, leptospirosis, Bordatella, and canine influenza. So you should expect to bring your dog in once a year for vaccines. When they're puppies, they're getting brand new vaccines more frequently for boosters.

Typically, we start vaccinating puppies of eight weeks of age. And if you get a new dog from a shelter, then sometimes they have vaccines, but sometimes they don't have all the vaccines that we would typically recommend. So we ask you to, at the very least send us your vaccine record so we can tell you whether your dog is up to date, but you should be bringing them in to see us when you first get them anyway. You’ll want to do this so we can make sure that they're healthy and we can always review their vaccines and see if there are any additional ones that we recommend for our area.