It Use To Be A Small Dog Problem…Why Is It Now All Dogs?

Why has dental disease in dogs skyrocketed? This use to mainly be a smaller dog problem. Our vets would tell us “small dogs just have bad teeth”. But wait, some larger breeds such as greyhounds are also plagued with aggressive dental disease.  Does this large breed just have bad teeth?

What has caused such a dramatic rise in dental infection in the last 25+ years? This oral disease now impacts pets large and small at the same rate. How can this be?  After all, haven’t  most of you been convinced to buy dental cookies, dental popcorn, dental cereal, dental juice water and dental tooth sticks and of course dental bones in order  to solve this deadly problem and it is deadly? Most if not all of these products are highly endorsed by AAHA, AVMA and AVDA( Most pet dental cookies hit the market around the late 1990s-25+years ago) and your vet suggest these products to you  based on AVMA and AVDA endorsements. And yet major surgery for dental disease is being required with such frequency that many vet clinics now set 1 or 2 days a week aside just for oral surgery. To cure a disease that was  not a disease 1-3 years earlier and preventable. 

The only treatment to a healthy mouth has been to do nothing. But left alone it will and did advance to  dental disease requiring oral surgery to remove the current advancing disease.  When dental health is neglected long enough the surrounding tissue starts to breakdown. Allowing  bacteria access to the blood system. This can permit bacteria to settle in the heart, liver, kidneys. 

Houndstooth Pet Dental gave vets new opportunities for their clinics. But with these new opportunities came huge opposition to change.  We knew it would be a long road.  But we were willing to travel it.

Here we are almost 30 years later and now hundreds of clinics across the country offer preventive dental care. The service has become a very import service to their clinic.   Your veterinary team can now offer  prevention, dental hygiene. Your vet can now care for senior pets that would have been turned away because of age( age should not be a reason for neglect) or because of being medically compromised.  Your vet can schedule follow up care based on each pets individual needs. 

 

• Houndstooth gave veterinarians the flexibility to offer a 360 degree approach to your pet’s dental care.
• Pre-surgical cleaning to shorten anesthesia time when time is a concern.
• Quality-of-Life Care is reserved for medically compromised pets. Where dental disease is present but oral surgery is not possible. In these cases our intention is to reduce the bacterial load traveling to the organs and relieving some of the  stressors on the immune system.

 

By including a multi-level approach to dental care your vet is now able to introduce regularly scheduled dental care before disease is present. But also giving them away to protect against the reoccurrence after oral surgery has been preformed to remove disease.  Thus, eliminating the need for your vet to wait until dental disease is present  to perform oral surgery. This service can be provided to most pets, including pets with medical conditions (See our Quality-of-Life Care procedure).