Dental Hygiene Questions About Cats

Video Transcript

"Hi this is Dr. Greg McDonald and I am here for Expert Village.com. and we are talking about dental care in cats. I thought it would be fun to go back to my website and my website is www.petpointers.com and pick out some of the questions that I get frequently that are asked about cats teeth. One of the things that people ask all the time is “can I have my cat’s teeth cleaned without anesthetic. The answer is yes and no because yes you could go ahead and have some tartar removed if your cat had some tartar and it is bothering you. We don’t really worry about the tartar as far as a medical problem and so I usually recommend not doing anything with the tartar. Once you start to get gum disease then the real diseases lying under the gum line and we actually have to have a dental anesthetic in order to clean it properly. In many states it is against the law to have _____ people cleaning cat’s teeth for money so you should really check in with your local veterinarian to be sure that it is legal and safe to have your cat’s tartar cleaned off their teeth. How can I tell if my cat has gum disease? This is a common sign that people ask all the time and one of the first things that people know they come to me and say something is wrong with my cat because his breath smells bad. We did have a look at Strike’s and all the dental tartar in his mouth with gum disease, he does really have bad breath. He has had a hard time picking up on dates and going dancing because of that. So that is the first thing that you are probably going to notice is if there is kind of a little bit of bad odor to your cat’s mouth and it is very important to have it checked because some times they could have a bone stuck or something else. So if you are getting a foul odor out of your cat’s mouth have your veterinarian have a look at your cat. One of the other ones that I have that is kind of fun is that there are a lot of products out there and I always get a little frustrated because some products work and some don’t. People ask me some times can you put something in the cat’s water to try to cure the dental disease of my cat and the bottom line is I haven’t found anything that really worked well for curing the dental disease. All of the ones that I have been exposed to don’t hurt your cat so it is fine to try it but you want to be sure that your cat is continuing to drink water. We don’t want to get a dehydrated cat because we put something in his water. "