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.

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.