Why Regular Pet Dental Cleaning is Important for Pet Health

When was the last time you took your pet for a dental cleaning? This is an appointment, carried out by your vet, in which they use special tools to clean your pet’s teeth and mouth. While all pet owners are recommended to brush their pet’s teeth properly at home, your vet has the essential tools and skills needed to perform a clean that far exceeds what you can do at home.

Regular pet dental cleanings are actually an essential part of your animal’s preventative care. This is because as well as simply cleaning your pet’s teeth, they can actually reduce the risk of them developing a number of debilitating symptoms as well as some serious health complications.

Need to know more? Here are a few of the main reasons why regular dental cleaning is important for your pet’s health.

A healthy mouth equals a healthy body

Many people don’t realize that oral health and general health are intrinsically linked to both humans and animals alike. Anything present in the mouth, including decay-causing bacteria, can enter the bloodstream and can therefore pass into the rest of the body. Dental disease in pets and humans occurs due to a superfluous number of bacteria in the mouth, and more specifically, the gum tissue. When these bacteria get into the bloodstream, it passes around the body to the major organs, including the heart, kidneys, and liver. This can damage your pet’s organs and put them at risk of developing other health conditions, such as diabetes, heart disease, kidney disease, and liver disorder. By getting regular pet dental cleanings, you can reduce the likelihood that your furbaby will develop dental disease and lower the risk of many health conditions.

They can prevent your pet from losing teeth

As a responsible pet owner, you want your beloved animal to retain healthy, functioning teeth for as long as possible. One of the best ways of doing this is by ensuring that they have the best oral health possible, and this can be achieved using regular pet dental cleaning. Dental disease that is left to progress can start to affect the structures that support your pet’s teeth, including the jawbone and gum tissue. This could lead to your pet losing teeth. Regular cleaning can help to prevent this from happening, keeping dental disease at bay and stopping teeth from falling out. This is important since any lost teeth could create space for others to move around, and these harder-to-reach gaps are more likely to be affected by plaque and eventually dental disease.

Help your pet to avoid bad breath

Bad breath, or halitosis, is a very common problem among animals. The most common cause of bad breath in pets is an accumulation of bacteria on their teeth. This is known as plaque and is a thin, sticky and transparent coating that forms on their teeth. While a healthy mouth has bacteria in it too, plaque promotes the growth of bad bacteria which are responsible for producing unpleasant odors. Regularly brushing your pet’s teeth at home will help to keep plaque to a minimum, but only a professional pet dental clean can remove plaque from hard to reach areas such as between teeth and those teeth at the very back of the mouth.

You might not think avoiding bad breath is important for your pet’s health, but did you know that you can actually tell a little about their overall wellbeing from their breath? For example, animals with diabetes often have sweet-smelling breath, while ongoing bad breath (despite no sign of dental disease) can be indicative of issues with the respiratory system, gastrointestinal tract or organs.
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For more information about pet dental cleaning and why it is important for pet health, please speak to our compassionate and knowledgeable veterinary team.