Cat Care - Teeth

Hi, I am Dr. Candy Olson at Greenbriar Animal Hospital. Were shooting a video on tips on how to care for your cat at home. This particular section is things that you can do to help keep your cats teeth and gums healthy. This is Lucky, she is a little kitty that we rescued, she is going to be helping us demonstrate this part of things. Now, this is an actual model of the teeth in cats. Cats have 30 teeth, and you can see theyre pretty small, but the roots are very long. The best thing to do for cat to keep their healthy is to brush their teeth, its just that most cats arent very cooperative with that. If you can though, they do sell special cat toothbrushes, but the best toothbrush is just a regular Q-tip. What you want to do is take a little dab of toothpaste thats made for cats. This particular stuff is a gel thats really nice, because there is no flavor to it, and it particularly helps their gums. What you would do is just take this little blob and rub it along the back of the mouth, do the other side. You would do best if you dont actually open their mouth, but what you do is just do it kind of blind, just little literally like this. It is a getting used to process, this is a kind of thing that a lot of cats wont tolerate. So, if you can do this, again, just a quick little swipe, and she is going, oh man, that was weird stuff. So, if they will let you do that, thats the very best thing that you can do, but there are a lot of other things too, and most people will combine various things that you can do to help keep you cats teeth healthy. This is one of them, this is the product that you can add to cats drinking water, and there is a bunch of those, that every time they drink, the mouth gets bathed with some of the stuff that helps. There are also quite a few different dental treats, tartar control treats, that kind of thing that you can give your cat on a regular basis. With treats obviously youve got to find one that they like. There are several excellent dental diets that are dry food, that are really good for their teeth. Thats one of the best things that you can do for their teeth, simply because theyre getting it almost everyday. The treats help quite a bit, but they also add a lot of calories. One of the advantages to some of the special dental diets for cats is that theyre low calorie, so that you can feed them as their regular food without worrying about them gaining weight, because youre giving them a lot of extra treats. So, if you have questions about how to take care of your cats teeth and gums, ask your veterinarian about some of these various things that you can do. So, thats the information on how to take care of your cats teeth and gums at home. Next, were going to be showing how to check your cat for fleas.