How To Brush Your Dog's Teeth At Home
Dr. Meghan Greco (featuring Gemma)
What are some common methods for maintaining dental health in dogs?
Obviously, dogs and cats are not brushing their teeth like ours. Commonly for dogs, we're giving them things like dental chews and bones because that mechanical action of chewing will help keep the tartar buildup down. There are still some teeth, especially the front teeth, that can build up even if the dogs are pretty good chewers. The front teeth, like the canine teeth in the front, are not really involved with chewing. They're more the ripping and tearing teeth, like if we were a wild dog. We will talk about how to brush their teeth later on in this video.
What options are available for maintaining dental health in cats?
Brushing their teeth is an option for cats if they are good and will let you, but dental diets or dental treats for cats are also available. These treats are a little bigger, so they have to chew them. Depending on whether your cat actually chews them or tries to swallow them whole, which is what my cat does, those can be helpful as well. Some cat dental disease is preventable with brushing, as it is with dogs. That's something that you can train them to let you do.
Do you have any tips for training pets to allow teeth brushing?
Especially for a food-motivated dog, I try to give them a treat after I brush the teeth and then get into a routine. They start to enjoy it and run to the room where you're going to do the brushing and things like that.
Can you describe the model you're showing us for better understanding of dental health?
The first thing I'm going to show you is a model of the dog teeth. We're going to go over it. The first side is the clean side. You can see that everything looks nice and white, and we're not having any redness on the gum or anything here. This is what we want. Our brushing and our chews are to try to keep this looking like this.
What does the severe side of the model demonstrate?
This is the severe side. Obviously, this is pretty severe, but you can see the differences between the other one and this side. We have a lot of redness up here on the gum. We have some gum recession, so you can start to see a little bit of the roots here. We also have some tartar, which is that yellow stuff on there. I always tell people that the tartar can kind of get like a barnacle on there, so it gets pretty thick. Often, we have to scale it off with a dental scaler to really clean the tooth and get a clean slate under there that we can work with to prevent tartar buildup.
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