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Hey, listeners, it's Lindsay Smith Rogers.

Vaccine hesitancy is front and center of the conversation about childhood vaccination,

but what about pet owners and their beloved four-legged friends?

Johns Hopkins veterinarians Megan Davis and Caitlin Waite talked to Stephanie Desmond about vaccination rates in pets,

why certain infections harm their humans too, and the burdens on doctors who have to convince pet owners to stick with the vaccine schedule.

Let's listen.

Caitlin Waite and Megan Davis, thanks so much for joining me.

Such a pleasure.

Thanks for having me.

So today I want to talk about vaccine hesitancy, but in pets.

Now, the pets aren't the ones who are hesitant, but I understand that this epidemic of vaccine hesitancy is impacting veterinarians and their patients because it's moved into the pet world.

Megan, what can you tell me?

Well, certainly, since I was in practice, this always has been the case, but in typically much smaller pockets.

And I will say, occasionally you do get a hesitant pet too. They usually manifest it in a very different way than the owner does. But nowadays,

we see that maybe even up to a quarter of our pet owners may have some degree of vaccine hesitancy.

And when you do see it, you'll sometimes see that owners will just not get most of the vaccines, but they'll still get a vaccine that could be required.

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