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.

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.