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.

As discussed, dental cleaning does require sedation, and it can be quite involved, but we put together a dentistry cleaning two-part video that goes into that, and we would invite you to look at that video. It will go far more in-depth about the procedure and give you some excellent visuals on precisely what we do.

There's not a whole lot that you, the dog owner, can do to prepare. It is an anesthetic procedure, so we ask that food be taken away after 10 o'clock the night before. And water's fine. We ask you to get the pet here early to start with pre-medications that morning and don’t give the dog breakfast either.

Sometimes we will have the owners give some pain medicine preemptively or antibiotics in a severely diseased mouth preemptively. But those are about the only things we ask owners to do to get ready for their dental procedures.