Beverly Animal Natural Health Center

February is pet dental health month

Here at the Beverly Animal Natural Health Center, your pet’s teeth are always evaluated at each exam. Think about how much our pets use their mouth. Not only for eating, but for grooming, vocalization, play behavior as well as defense ( well, maybe offense at times too). And they still have not learned how to brush them!! Just as in people, there are certain breeds and lines of pets that are even more predisposed to periodontal disease. My goal is to be advocates of oral pet health as the animals tend not to complain even with fractured teeth or bleeding gums.

The best thing to evaluate your pet’s month is to gently lift the lip and look at the teeth and gums. Teeth should ideally be nice and white with no brown or yellow staining. The gums should be nice and pink with out redness and inflammation. There are varying degrees of disease that occur in both cats and dogs. Tartar is typically cream or brown colored calcified plaque that hardens on the teeth after time. In some cases, the gums can grow over damaged teeth attempting to protect them.

We are very fortunate as Katie is our excellent dental technician and we are able to do full oral radiographs on all our patients. It is remarkable how much can be hidden under the gumline. Here is a link to a website on dental care www.vohc.org. Beware! Some of the pictures are quite graphic.

We encourage owners to start brushing their pet’s teeth when they are young. Ideally, it should be done every day but even if we compromise and do it 3 times a week it is more than a hundred times a year than we did before! You do not have to even open your pets mouth to brush their teeth as we do ours as they have more vertical surfaces rather than the horizontal surfaces that we have.

Please feel free to call the office if you have any questions about your pet’s oral health.

Keeping everyone healthy!

I would like to introduce you to a great website on parasitism! www.petsandparasites.org is a website developed by the Companion Animal Parasite Council. The CAPC is a group of veterinarians and other health professionals that have created guidelines for optimal control of parasites that threaten pets and the ones they love!

Having kids and pets can pose some threats but with good hygiene, routine fecal examinations and use of “strategic” dewormings, you can make the threat much less significant. Over the least few years, we have emphasized “parasite control” for our patients. We refer to Interceptor as parasite control than calling it the traditional “heartworm prevention” as we are fortunate in this area to not see a significant number of cases of heartworm. It is another story with all the cases of diarrhea that we see due to intestinal parasites! Interceptor is a great product as it not only protects against heartworm but also roundworms, hookworms and whipworms.

We also recommend year round interceptor as these pesky parasites can survive winters even harsher than this!