Video: Healthy & Unhealthy Cat Mouths

Identify a healthy & unhealthy mouth, teeth and gums in cats this free feline dental health video.

Video Transcript

Hi this is Dr. Greg McDonald and I here for Expert Village.com and we are talking about disease of your cat's mouth, mostly dental problems. I wanted to go over with you some of the normal anatomies that you will see on your cat’s teeth that are normal. I have a special model to look at that will show you some of the abnormalities that you might find in your cats mouth if you look. Some cats are a little difficult to look at and might take two of you to do that so all you have to do is hold the cats mouth open and some cats that have been medicated a lot will fight you but work with them and kind of peak every once in a while until you get they sleepy. So this is a normal cat’s mouth and again it is a model so that you can see the roots of the teeth as well as all the other teeth they have. You can see they are carnivorous and they have these really sharp canine teeth that are designed for grabbing and killing their prey. These other teeth in this area up here are really designed more for grinding of these teeth along this way. You can also see all of their roots go deep into their mouth and again these are actual cat’s teeth that have been mounted in plastic so you can see how they work. Those are all normal. I also have a model here that shows the abnormal teeth. Now on this side you see normal teeth and if we turn it around this way you can actually see some of the disease that cats get in their mouth and this is what you would be looking for. This is actually an interesting one because they have an extra tooth right here; it’s a baby tooth that did not fall out. It is called a retained deciduous tooth and that causes some dental disease because the food gets stuck in between those two teeth and those should be removed. You can obviously see there is some tartar on all of these teeth. The tartar in and of itself is not a problem but you can see how red and inflamed these gums are. The tartar built up on the teeth has caused the gum to become inflamed to the point where they actually have gingivitis and the gingivitis is actually exposing the animal’s bloodstream to bacteria every day. On this area down here, you can see there is actually a broken tooth and exposed root canal. On this side is a normal tooth so you can tell here that this poor kitty cat if he was alive was having a lot of pain with a tooth broken like that and an exposed root canal. So we are going to talk a little bit about what your veterinarian will do for this but there are also things you can do at home to prevent your cat from having a mouth that gets to looking this bad. Some of it is very interesting. It is actually genetics. Some cats really need to have their teeth cleaned no matter what we do every six months. Other cats do find their whole life just on special diets so look in your cat’s mouth and decide if your veterinarian looks at it.

Healthy & Unhealthy Cat Mouths

Comments

Related Ads

Related Articles & Videos