Caring for Puppy Teeth, Ears & Nails

Video Transcript

"So I wanted to talk a little about health care with your dog. Some things you can do at home. One of the things that is really helpful with the dog is, if he'll let you, brush his teeth. You can see, he still has a lot of puppy teeth here. They're really sharp, sharp puppy teeth. But now would be a good time, see how nice and easy your dog let's me touch his teeth and everything? Would be a good time to teach him how to brush his teeth, to train him when he's young like this to brush his teeth. Because then you're going to have clean teeth and you're not going to have a bad breath. And it also, later on, your puppy may not need to have to have an anesthetic to clean his teeth. And so, it's really nice if you just kind of take your time now and make it like a daily ritual and make it fun for him. And when you get a toothbrush the first thing you want to do is not just start brushing the teeth, but just let him get used to it. So it'll take about a month for him to understand what "brush your teeth" means. And then, the other thing is there are some special toothbrushes, but it's very important that you get special toothpaste. The toothpaste that we use is stuff that has no detergent in it, because a puppy doesn't know he's supposed to spit it out. And so, again, we have it in different flavors so that they like the taste of it and it makes your job a little bit easier to train your puppy, how to take care of his teeth. Another thing that I think is pretty important and stuff that you can do at home, is puppies have a lot of problems with their ears and you can take a little Kleenex, maybe a little mineral oil, and again, see how nice your puppy is, because I think you've already been working on this because he lets you mess with him. A lot of dogs don't like to be messed with this way. But you can see there's a little bit of wax down in here. The ear canal goes deep down into the ear and what you want to do with that is just kind of clean the areas that you can see. If you leave the wax alone in there, he'll wind up, a place for bacteria to grow and predispose your puppy to have ear infections. The other thing that you should be doing is to handle their feet. And you can see their nails. It looks like you've already trimmed them a little bit, but if you've handle their feet a lot like this, when he does go to the veterinarian or the groomer and have his nails trimmed, he's not going to be all worried about somebody messing with his feet. I can see you've done that. Most puppies won't let you do that. When you trim his nails, you can see right here and you can take off about this much each time. And you have to be careful because there's a nerve supply and a blood supply that comes down. If you cut it back, even this far, you could make it bleed and it would hurt him. So, if they get hurt with one nail trim when they're young, then they never want anybody touching their feet again."