Do You Trust Your Vet?

Do you trust your vet? How much? It turns out your answer may well be a good predictor of how likely your dog or cat is to be appropriately vaccinated.

The hesitancy and misinformation about vaccines that has been growing for decades has influenced pet owners as much as parents with human children. I have written repeatedly about the evidence for the safety and efficacy of veterinary vaccines, the problem with vaccine hesitancy among pet owners, and the role of mistrust and misinformation in reducing confidence in, and use of, vaccines. 

A couple of years ago, I talked about a research study evaluating  vaccine hesitancy among dog owners. Some of the conclusions of this study were these-

• “a large minority of dog owners consider vaccines administered to dogs to be unsafe (37%), ineffective (22%), and/or unnecessary (30%). 
  
• A slight majority of dog owners (53%) endorse at least one of these three positions.” 
  
• 48% of dog owners opposed mandatory rabies vaccination and agreed with the statement, “The decision to vaccinate dogs that are kept as pets should be left up to individual pet owners.” 

These views were less likely in those with a college education, and more common in those who also held misinformed views about vaccination for children.

A new study has looked at this issue again, in both cat and dog owners.

Haeder SF. Trust in veterinarians and association with vaccine information sources and vaccination status among dog and cat owners. J Am Vet Med Assoc. 2025 Jan 31:1-11.

The findings support and amplify messages from previous work, showing that while most pet owners trust their vet and rely on them as the main source of information, all too many are still less trusting and more influenced by less reliable sources of information. The basic findings were these-

• Overall, 62.9% of dog and 61.2% of cat owners were classified as trusting their veterinarians. 
  
• The longer people know their vets, the more confidence they have in them.
  
• Vets were the primary source of information about vaccines for dog and cat owners, followed by the internet (Figure 1)
  
• Owners with less trust in vets were more likely to turn to other sources, especially the internet, for information.
  
• People who trust their vets are more likely to have their pets properly vaccinated than those who don’t.
  
• Those who rely more on the internet for information are less likely to have their pets properly vaccinated.

Other variables, such as political affiliation and education level, were inconsistently associated with reliance on vets as a primary information source.

This is not a revolutionary study, but one that supports the broad understanding we already have about the role of personal relationships built over time in establishing trust and support clients in making science-based decisions about their pets’ health. It also highlights the unsurprising deleterious role of the internet as a source of information about vaccination (and many other topics!). 

In my presentations on mistrust and misinformation, I have emphasized that trust in vets and science remain high overall, though it is eroding among some segments of society. We still have the confidence of many pet owners, and we can still help them protect their pets from the mistakes encouraged by sources of anti-scientific information. But we cannot blindly rely on that confidence, and we must continually nurture the relationships with our clients that allow us to help them resist the rising forces of mistrust and misinformation.

Figure 1.