Teeth Cleaning... In my opinion...

Over the last few years, there has been what can only be described as a boom regarding our dog’s teeth and the overall health of them… and this is a good thing…

But I have been asking myself… where has it come from?

I remember growing up, and we have had dogs all throughout my life… and like many things to do with our pets… back then there was never the focus on grooming, if the dog needed brushing it was my mum with a hair brush and a plastic bag, and bathing was done in the summer with the hose, and we never once thought about cleaning their teeth…

Way back when, our dogs, were fed whatever was the popular brand of food, and that would have been part wet food and part biscuit… as well as the leftovers from Sunday dinner (we did know about cooked bones back then!) and the odd carrot here and there.  

Now, that’s not say that we didn’t care about our dogs, because we absolutely did, but if something was up with their teeth, then it was a vet visit, and any oral treatment was done in response to an issue seen, like if the dog stopped eating, it may be a bad tooth or 2, or something more serious.

But, in recent years and this is in the last 2 or 3 years at the most dental health in dogs has become a key area to ensure that the rest of your dog stays healthy.

Along with the manual teeth cleaning diet can play a part, we are also more aware of our dogs dietary needs, and a balanced diet can also contribute to better oral health.

So, what is a healthy for a dog?

This picture indicates a healthy mouth, the teeth are a good colour, with no build-up of plaque or tarter, and the gums are a good colour, salmon pink is the ideal colour for a gum.

In contrast, this picture shoes what an unhealthy tooth and gum looks like, there is severe build up of tartar on the teeth (the brown stuff) and the gums are a deep red, indicating the likelihood of gum disease.

There are varying stages between the first and second pictures… as we can see here, this picture shows you an indication of what the colour of your dog’s gums can mean.  It is not and nor should be a definitive guide, but if your dogs gums are any other colour than pink – then get it checked.

But there is still the question - where does cleaning your dogs’ teeth come into it? And more importantly how effective is it? Really… and at what point between picture 1 and picture 2 do you start and stop cleaning and seek vet advice.

Let’s start here… why do we clean our teeth?  We clean our teeth to remove plaque.  Plaque is the sticky film of bacteria that builds up during the day from eating and drinking, and then we clean our teeth to remove it… if we didn’t, that plaque overtime would harden and calcify forming tartar, and cleaning our teeth with a tooth brush would become ineffective, so brushing our teeth is a preventative against that build up.

It’s the same with our dogs. 

The big difference with how we look at our own oral health and our dogs is that cleaning our dogs’ teeth is still seen as a reactive action to a problem.  

And as a groomer, I see lots of dogs with teeth like the second picture, when tartar has built up and our owners are being advised to get the teeth cleaned… what the vet means is the teeth need to be descaled under aneasthetic to remove that hard build up, including tartar under the gum line - shown below.

I am also aware that vets are sometimes not giving the right advise where groomers are concerned and our capabilities and the equipment we use, we DO NOT use ULTRASONIC anything, dentists use ultrasonic descalers to remove plaque and tartar build up on human teeth. 

As groomers, we cannot descale teeth at all in any shape or form. 

The equipment we use is an ultrasound toothbrush that produces very low-level sound waves, that produce microscopic bubbles and when used with the toothpaste, can penetrate and break down plaque (the sticky film) NOT tartar (the hard brown stuff), plaque can then be polished off with a fingertip, we also CAN NOT scrape teeth with a metal tool as this is dangerous, and can damage the enamel on the tooth.  So, when I say I can’t clean tartar off its because I can’t, I don’t have the equipment or qualifications to do so.

From my experience, where teeth cleaning is concerned is, it’s important to start getting your dogs teeth cleaned early, that way we can make sure that the plaque doesn’t build up too much and start to form tartar, but to be most effective this needs to be done regularly! 

As mentioned, we clean our teeth twice a day to remove plaque build-up, but we are expecting that cleaning our dogs’ teeth once every 8-12 weeks is enough to prevent the same, this is ineffective. 

It’s ineffective to leave it this long, because dogs mouths are dirty places, their diets are not as varied as ours, they eat all sorts out on walks, and they clean themselves with their teeth and tongues… so put all of that together… we need to be doing more, but I am not saying that we need to clean our dogs teeth twice a day, but we definitely need to be cleaning them more frequently than every 8 – 12 weeks to make a difference.