Dental disease is quite painful, but most dogs don't tell you. Most of the time, they don't whine and cry and complain. They deal with things and move on, but when we look for subtle changes, we can see these things. We may see a dog trying to eat, but the food falls out of their mouth. We may see a dog who is chewing, and we see the food from this side, or it never goes to the right side. The dog is perhaps only chewing on the left side of the mouth because the right side hurts. Some of these pets will drool excessively. And then, we can see behavior changes, because again, dental disease is painful. Some of these dogs become very quiet. They just aren't as interactive or as social as they'd like to be; they want to be by themselves.

Depending on the problem, the pet has to come back to have the problem addressed in the vast majority of cases. Occasionally, we'll deal with something minor, but when we deal with a pet's mouth, they do have to be sedated to deal with that. And we don't do that at the examination. At the examination, we're trying to get a good overview of what may be going on with the pet's mouth, put together a treatment plan on what we think we may be dealing with, and then set up a follow-up appointment for that.

Can dogs get cavities? The short answer, yes. The long answer, very infrequently. Dog's teeth are shaped differently than ours. We have teeth that are set up for grinding and making the food very, very small. Dogs' teeth are much more pointed, and they're set to shear and cut the food into chunks, and therefore there's not the flat surface to get the cavity on much like it is for me or you. The other thing is that dogs don't tend to eat the sweets we do, drink the Colas we do, or those other silly things that we do that lead to cavities.

We see fractured teeth, slap fractures that occur, particularly on the chewing teeth. We'll see broken teeth and worn teeth. Sometimes we get hair and junk stuck between the teeth that affect the gums. We see sticks and bones and all kinds of stuff that dogs like to chew. And when you chew a lot, you can lead to all sorts of problems.

We see those occasionally but not a whole lot, perhaps in youngsters. A healthy mouth has a beautiful white crown with no tartar, calculus buildup, yellow buildup, or a crack in the tooth, and the gums are a nice, happy pink color. We also don’t want to see any inflammation or redness along the gum.

When we do a dental exam, we're looking for oral pathology. And what is oral pathology? Well, oral pathology is any kind of dental disease, whether it’s inflamed gums, a broken tooth, a foreign body in the mouth, or some type of a mass or tumor, so we’re essentially looking for any kind of dental disease.

Good question. One of the major diseases that cats get is cardiomyopathy or hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, which is enlarged muscles of the heart that don't flex very well. And that makes it hard for the heart to pump blood. And so when that happens, that can be life-threatening for some of our cats.