Lepto is quite a nasty thing to have your dog contract. If they do it is very expensive to treat and many times the dog has kidney failure in the end. If the dog does survive, and quick diagnosis and treatment are the dogs that survive, you have to have testing done for the next minimum of 3 months and the dog has to test clear of shedding the virus.
Wiccan, a westie I had owned and placed with awesome clients, lived in North London, On. She never went in the bush. She came in one evening and threw up Maple keys. She wasn't normally a dog that would eat things so the owners were surprised but not too concerned. However, she threw up more a little later and started to shiver. They rushed her to Vet Emerg were she was, fortuanately, treated immediately for Lepto while the did the testing and waited for culture results. She was very ill so was transferred to the University of Guelph small animal department. There she stayed for 2 weeks in intensive care. In the meantime, the Jack Russell that had been at the Emerg clinic died of it. Once she was released they had to keep her in the yard and do a bleach treatment every place she peed for 4 months, as lepto is a zoonotic disease and can infect the water table, as well as being really cautious handling her themselves. They think the raccoons that travel in the area urinated and defecated on the roof which washed down with the maple keys and that is how she was infected. I don't know what the pricetag of all this was but they did say that she was the price of a very expensive TV. The interesting aside to this story is that she was never vaccinated for Lepto but when the culture confirmed it, it wasn't one of the 4 that the vaccine is for.
Lepto is a menace especially when the water table is high due to melt off and rain. A old employer of mine had a Shih Tzu that only went on one walk a week, around the block in the middle of a large city. It also was infected and cost the earth to treat. It died less than a year later of kidney failure. It was about 6 years old.
I still don't routinely vaccinate my dogs as I have also seen bad reactions to the vaccine. I do give them the limited protection provided in the vaccine if we have a particularily wet Spring. It's something you have to decide for yourself if you are willing to take the chance.
