By the age of three, most dogs and cats have some degree of dental disease. Almost none of their owners know it, because animals don't stop eating when their mouth hurts — they chew on the other side and carry on.
What you can look for
Lift the lip and look at the back teeth, not the front ones.
- Brown or yellow crust along the gum line
- Red, puffy gum where it meets the tooth
- A genuinely bad smell — not "dog breath", a rotten smell
- Chewing on one side, or dropping food
- Drooling, sometimes tinged with blood
- Pawing at the face, or a loose tooth
Cats hide it better than dogs. A cat that's gone quiet, is grooming less, or eating more slowly should have its mouth looked at.
Why it matters beyond the mouth
Advanced dental disease is a permanent source of infection in a well-supplied blood bed. Bacteria enter the bloodstream and reach the heart, liver and kidneys. In an older animal, treating a bad mouth is as much about protecting the organs as the teeth — and it's painful, continuously, for years.
What the procedure involves
It requires general anaesthesia. Any clinic offering to scale your pet's teeth while it's awake is doing something cosmetic — disease sits below the gum line, and you can't reach it on a conscious animal.
Under anaesthesia we examine each tooth, scale above and below the gum, extract anything unsalvageable, and polish afterwards — polishing matters, because a scaled tooth left rough collects plaque faster than before. For older animals we run bloods first to check kidney and liver values. Admitted in the morning, home the same evening.
Afterwards
Soft food for a few days, particularly after extractions, and pain relief for as long as we prescribe it. Most owners report the same thing a week later: the animal is brighter and more playful than it's been in a long time — the clearest evidence of how much discomfort it had been quietly tolerating.
Keeping it away
Brushing is the only thing that genuinely works, and it works well. Daily is ideal, three times a week is worthwhile. Use toothpaste made for animals — human toothpaste isn't safe for them. Dental chews help a little but don't replace brushing, and nothing replaces a scale once disease is established.