Cats can have broken teeth because they chewed on something they shouldn't have or took some type of trauma blow. They can have severe Gingivitis, as we had talked about. Tooth resorption is something that's unfortunately very common in cats. And it is a cavity-like syndrome that occurs underneath the gum line where the teeth slowly resorb, and it’s an excruciating process in cats. We see stomatitis, which is an inflammation of the gums. Once again, we see masses, growths, tumors, and foreign bodies.

We see some healthy mouths in young cats. We’ll see a nice, white, happy crown, the white part of the tooth with no tartar and no calculus. And more importantly, we see gums that are a happy, healthy pink—not that red, angry, inflamed tissue called Gingivitis. We usually see these very healthy mouths in cats that are two years or less.

Preferably, we deal with it all at the same time. If your cat is under anesthesia, we'd like to have one anesthetic episode with this pet, and I want to take care of everything we can at that point. Now, that being said, we periodically find more things than we had determined we might, so we always have your cell number so that we can give you a call and talk about what we found. And hopefully, we can deal with everything then. But occasionally, these procedures can last two and even three hours. It’s a very rare occasion where we will have to recover the cat and have them come back in two or three weeks to finish the procedure. The vast majority of the time, we deal with it then.

At a minimum, your cat’s teeth should be examined once a year. We examine a cat's mouth and check the teeth every time the cat comes to see us. That's twice-yearly for our wellness plan patients. And every time your pet is in here for any type of illness, whether it’s an ear or skin infection, we always check the teeth.

Again, dental disease is an infection. And if the infection is bad enough, we want to try to get it under control before getting into the procedure. It helps the mouth heal better. Even after the disease is dealt with, there still may be some infection in the bone surrounding the tooth. We've got to get rid of that as well, hence sending the antibiotics home with you.

That varies. They can be as short as 30 minutes or less for a grade one dental, but I've had dentals go two and three hours and still have to come back for more. Some of the procedures can become very long. It just depends on what we're dealing with.

There's no doubt about that. We're very proactive in pain management, and pain management helps the recovery process, and extractions are painful. They're painful for us, so they're painful for your pet. We do nerve blocks just like the dentist does for you or me, and then there will invariably be pain medicine to go home, whether it's just for a few days or longer, depending on what we truly find and what we need to deal with.

So the likelihood is yes, they will be getting dental x-rays. There's what we consider a grade one dental, which is minor tartar and calculus buildup that we don't routinely do dental x-rays, but probably 80 to 90% of our dentals need dental x-rays. And the reason is that dogs can’t tell us where it hurts. You know, you go in to see the dentist, and you say, "My tooth hurts over here," and they still x-ray your teeth to find out what's going on, right? Well, your pet doesn't tell us that. So the dental x-ray's the only way to truly tell what's going on underneath the gum line, what's going on in the periodontal space-and we see if the dog genuinely has some oral disease there. So, routinely dental x-rays are performed, yes.