Spotting an Unhealthy Cat Mouth

Video Transcript

"Hi this is Dr. Greg McDonald and I am here with Expert Village.com and I want to show you a live example of some gum disease in cats. This is a cat that has had dental disease and unfortunately this poor cat is unable to have an anesthetic because he has a heart problem so we have been managing this medically and it is really difficult to get good control on that in this cat but it also serves as an excellent model so you can see the problems they might have if we don’t take care of their teeth. Stripe show me your mouth here? You can see that he has a lot of gum disease up here and that also there is a lot of tartar built up on this tooth and he actually has a hole in his tooth over here because the tartar has chewed a hole in tooth on that side. If we look over on the other side, you can actually see he is missing a lot of teeth on the upper side because they have actually fallen out. If he will let me, I will open his mouth up and you can look inside. You can see he has a lot of gum disease and a lot of disease going on in his teeth. So this cat would be an excellent category for a cat that should have his teeth cleaned. Unfortunately, we have to put him under anesthesia and this cat has a problem with his heart that precludes that. We have actually tried twice on this cat to get his teeth cleaned and his heart stopped so it is unfortunate that he has to live with a tough mouth but we are going to go into a lot of the details about how we look at the animal’s health prior to putting them under anesthesia so that they can make it through without having a problem. Thank you Stripe for showing us your teeth and we will be back in a minute to talk a little more. "