The results of stress on immunity can be significant.
How many ways do you experience stress everyday?
Stress is a major contributing factor to illness. When you – or your animal – are stressed, the body excretes hormones that down-regulate your immune system.
This can easily be seen when a simply blood test called a Complete Blood Count (CBC) is performed. Under stress, the white blood cell count will lower and change composition.
When this happens the body can’t fight disease as well and the result is an illness that could have been avoided, or an illness from which it takes longer to recover.
You know what stresses you: short deadlines, coming due payments, relational issues. But, do you know what stressed your animals?
One of the top stressors in animals is travel.
Think we’re kidding?
When researchers needed to create a mild respiratory illness in horses to test a new drug they had a hard time getting the horses sick. That is, until they put them on a trailer and drove them around for about a day. When those horses returned and were challenged with a mild respiratory virus they got sick easily.
So if your animal was already ill, why would you add on to this the additional stress of travel?
Don’t do it. Give Mobile Veterinary Service a call and we’ll come to you!