Objects returned from Session.load() appear to be lazy-loading proxies. This is problematic for me as Hibernate does not even check that the returned object exists (until a property of the object is accessed). Is it possible to disable this behavior at the application level, without also disabling all the collection and association lazy-loading (which is less problematic because failures are less likely)? I'm aware that I could replace all calls to Session.load with Session.get and do an explicit null check, but I'm wondering if there is another way...

Manual says this behaviour is intended, you should only use load if you know for sure the ID exists

Can you set the lazy=false for the top level object alone.

lazy=false on each class might work -- though I was hoping for a global configuration setting... And this won't prevent lazy association (and collection) loading, will it?