Dental care

Dental disease is the most common thing we see that owners have not come in about. Bad breath gets accepted as normal dog or cat smell. It is not: it is bacteria, and underneath it is usually gum disease that has been painful for a long time.

Animals are extremely good at hiding oral pain. They keep eating, because the alternative is not eating. The clearest evidence of how much it hurt is how much brighter they are afterwards, which owners report to us constantly and are always slightly surprised by.

Assessment and treatment need a general anaesthetic, because the disease is below the gumline where nothing can be seen or cleaned in a conscious animal. Anaesthetic-free cleaning, which is sometimes offered, makes the visible crown look better and does nothing about the problem.

The small-breed pattern in Nairobi

Dental disease is not evenly distributed across this city’s dogs, and the reason is breed rather than care.

Apartment living across Westlands, Kilimani and Kileleshwa selects for small dogs, and small dogs get dental disease early and badly. The mechanism is simple: selective breeding shrank the jaw far faster than it shrank the teeth. A Yorkshire terrier carries essentially the same number of teeth as a labrador in a fraction of the space, so they crowd, rotate and overlap, and food packs into gaps a brush cannot reach.

The practical consequence is that a four-year-old small breed in a Nairobi flat is more likely to need dental work than an eight-year-old large dog on a Karen plot. Owners of small dogs are often surprised by this and reasonably assume they have done something wrong. They have not.

Small breeds also retain deciduous teeth more often, where a baby canine fails to fall out and sits alongside the adult one, trapping food between them. It is worth checking for at the sterilisation visit, because if it needs removing, doing it under the same anaesthetic saves a second procedure.

What to look for at home

Lift the lip once a week. You are looking for red gum margins where the tooth meets the gum, brown or yellow build-up along the back teeth, and any tooth that looks longer than its neighbours because the gum has receded from it.

Bad breath is the sign owners notice, and it is the one they most often dismiss. It is not normal dog smell. It is bacterial, and it is telling you something has been going on for a while.