How to Brush Cat Teeth

How to Brush Cat Teeth
Hi this is Dr. Greg McDonald and I am here with Expert Village.com. We are going to talk a little bit about home care of your cat’s teeth. Things you can do at home to prevent dental disease in your cat. One of the products that we really like is called CET Toothpaste and this comes with a really neat little toothbrush that you can put on your finger and I think it is excellent for cats because a regular toothbrush is really hard to put into their mouth. This slides over your finger like this and it has little brushes on it and you can brush your cat’s teeth. Stripe, why don’t you come over here and we will show you a little bit about how to do that. The thing is that you don’t want to use regular toothpaste in homecare because cat’s don’t know that they are supposed to spit out the toothpaste and if they swallow it, it has some detergent in it that can upset their GI tract so you do need to get a special tooth polish from your veterinarian and one of the other fun things that I talked about if you can make it fun for your cat to get their teeth done by successive approximations. By that I mean you just get a little bit done every day. The first couple of times you try it you are not trying to get anything done with the teeth cleaning, you are just trying to expose the cat to something that he is going to have done to him that he won’t be afraid of later in life. If you just go home with something like this and you just force your finger in their mouth, then he is going to runaway and never gets anything done. Now Strike has had some oral care before this way and you just start by just brushing the teeth a little bit like that and you can see they actually let you take some of that tartar and brush it off. If I had some of that stuff on there, we would actually be accomplishing a lot more. You put this special tooth polish onto this and you rub it onto the teeth. The real key to homecare especially in cats and this works for dogs too, is the training process. Just like any animal if they like coming over and visiting to you they get groomed or petted and they like that is because you have done nothing to hurt them. So if you can start out slowly I think you should take like a months time period every day and call your cat over and give him a little bit of taste of the tooth polish and say, let’s brush, let’s brush and just get a little bit done every time and you may actually avoid having to put your cat under anesthesia at a later date. So this has been about home dental care that you can do for your cat. Check in with your veterinarian for the right products so you don’t use something that can make them sick and you can really do this at home.