Appropriate vaccination protects cats from severe disease. Understanding evidence-based vaccination schedules prevents both disease suffering and over-vaccination.
Appropriate vaccination is a welfare intervention that prevents diseases causing significant suffering - panleukopenia is often fatal, herpesvirus causes chronic painful eye and respiratory disease, and rabies is universally fatal. Under-vaccination allows preventable disease. However, over-vaccination creates unnecessary injection stress and rare but serious adverse events including vaccine-associated sarcoma - a malignant tumor at injection sites that requires aggressive treatment. The welfare-optimal approach follows evidence-based vaccination guidelines: core vaccines every 3 years after initial series for adult cats, risk-based non-core vaccines only when exposure risk warrants, and injection site location tracking to enable early sarcoma detection. This balances disease prevention with minimizing vaccine-related welfare risks.