Dental care

Dental disease is the thing we most often find that nobody came in about. Bad breath gets filed as normal dog or cat smell. It is not. It is bacteria, and beneath it is usually gum disease that has been painful for a long time.

The reason it goes untreated is that animals conceal oral pain almost completely. They keep eating, because the alternative is not eating. Owners are consistently surprised by how much livelier their pet is a fortnight after a dental, and that change is the clearest evidence of how much it had been hurting.

Assessment and treatment need a general anaesthetic, because the disease is below the gumline where nothing can be seen or cleaned in a conscious animal. Anaesthetic-free cleaning, sometimes offered as a gentler alternative, makes the visible surface look better and addresses none of it.

As with all our anaesthetic work here, dentals go on a morning list. Recovery from anaesthetic in afternoon coastal heat is avoidable and we avoid it.

What you can do between dentals

A scale and polish resets the mouth. What happens over the following two years is largely down to what happens at home, and this is the part almost nobody is told.

Brushing is the only thing that reliably works. Daily if you can, three times a week as a floor. Use a toothpaste made for animals, never human toothpaste, which contains fluoride they should not swallow and sometimes xylitol, which is poisonous to dogs. Start by letting the animal lick the paste off your finger for a week before a brush ever appears. Rushing this stage is how owners conclude their dog will not tolerate brushing.

Dental chews help, modestly. They are not a substitute for brushing and the marketing overstates them, but a chew that takes real work to get through does mechanically clean the back teeth, which are the ones that matter and the ones you can least easily reach.

Bones are a mixed picture. Raw bones do clean teeth. They also fracture them, and a slab fracture of a carnassial tooth is a painful and expensive problem. Cooked bones splinter and should never be given. If you use bones, use large raw ones under supervision and accept the trade-off knowingly.

Water additives and dental diets have a real but small effect. Worth having, not worth relying on.

Cats hide it even better than dogs

Feline dental disease is chronically under-treated everywhere in Kenya, and cats are far better than dogs at concealing it. A cat with painful teeth carries on eating, then starts preferring soft food, then eats on one side, then drools slightly. Owners rarely connect those steps.

Cats also get resorptive lesions, where the tooth structure is destroyed from within. They are genuinely painful and they cannot be seen without an anaesthetised examination. If your cat has become fussy about dry food, that is worth a look rather than a change of brand.