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.

So old is not the question—what we're looking for is healthy. Is your pet too old? Well, we've done dentals on 18-year-old dogs and 20-year-old cats before, so age is not the issue. It is a matter of what we're dealing with and how healthy the pet is. We've routinely worked on dental disease in senior dogs because they're healthy enough, and the dental disease is decreasing their quality of life. And if we can give them a better quality of life, we should.

So that's a widespread concern of clients and totally understandable, but we take anesthesia very seriously. The first thing we’re going to do is a physical exam on your pet to get a general assessment. We will do a blood and heart screening to make sure the pet has good, healthy parameters. And if they do, then anesthetic complications are extremely rare. And if your pet does have some pre-existing conditions, then we're going to address those. And if we know about these preexisting conditions, in many cases, we can work around those with our anesthetic protocols so that we can still deal with the pet's dental disease, even in a pet who has some preexisting heart condition or liver condition-or kidney disease. We’re quite confident in our protocols. And again, it is all but unheard of to have an issue.

Well, there may be anesthesia-free tartar cracking, but it's sure not a dental cleaning. Whenever you do a dental cleaning on a pet, you must get under the gum line, and no dog will allow you to clean under the gum line without sedation. The other thing is, if you're just cracking the tartar off with the instruments to crack the tartar, you're putting grooves in the enamel, which makes it easier for more tartar to build up. The dog doesn’t just need the cleaning, but they need the polishing and the fluoride treatment as well. So, no, there's no such thing as an anesthesia-free dental cleaning. And our accreditation from AHA requires that we use anesthesia.

When the anesthetic is given to a pet, there's a doctor involved and a trained technician. Those two work in combination to place a catheter to get the pet intubated. And then there is a technician whose only job is to monitor the pet while they're under anesthesia, so they stand with a clipboard monitoring your pet's EKG, monitoring your pet's oxygenation, their blood pressure, and their respiration and CO2, making sure to stay on top of your dog while they are sedated. If anything runs amok, we know within seconds that something's not going well and can react now instead of reacting later.

Well, you could try to clean them like ours, but we don't recommend it. And you're also not going to do a very good job with that. So, pets don't say, "Ah," they don't open their mouth and let us get in there and mess around and scrape and crawl around and do our x-rays, et cetera. So yeah, the pets do have to be sedated for that. There has to be anesthesia involved to be able to truly assess the tooth. We really can't tell what's going on with that probe in the tooth without taking the tooth’s dental x-rays. And that can't be done in a pet who's awake.

Well, every pet needs a dental exam. There's just no doubt about it—a minimum of once a year, preferably twice a year. And we do dental exams every time your pet comes to see us, so a sick exam also includes a dental exam. If the dog has not had a dental exam in a year, they need it.