While at the vet to get my cat some shots and a check up, the vet mentioned that he had fairly significant buildup of plaque and gingivitis, and that heart problems and other ill effects could result in the long term. She suggested some teeth cleaning (maybe it goes beyond simple brushing of teeth, I’m really not sure), recommending it be done every year or two. Fine. BUT when I got the estimate in the mail yesterday, I saw the procedure apparently costs $500! The dentistry itself is $85 but most of the fee is anaesthesia.
Does this seem unreasonable? First of all, anaesthesia… for a teeth cleaning? And is this whole thing really necessary–I certainly won’t be paying $500 every single year for such a procedure, but how bad could it be for the cat to have junk on his teeth?
My cat had it done a couple of years ago, and hasn’t needed it since. It wasn’t $500, but it was a couple of hundred, I don’t remember exactly how much. And same as you, most was for anaesthesia. Can you imagine cleaning a cat’s teeth without putting them under? :eek:
I’ve never had any of my cats’ teeth cleaned. Ever. It’s never even been suggested. But I did just now get up and look at Harry’s and there doesn’t appear to be any build up at all. So maybe my cats are good brushers?
My Bassett Hound, however, just had her teeth cleaned and it was $185. About $100 was anethesia and the rest for the cleaning. $500 sounds amazingly unreasonable. I can’t imagine why a cat’s teeth cleaning would cost 2½ times what it cost to clean my Bassett’s huge mouth full of teeth, though.
I would say yes, your cat DOES need to have her teeth cleaned. And as to the cost, that can vary greatly with area of the country. I just had my kitty’s teeth done a few months ago and it was almost $500 (dental work, anasthesia, and blood work to make sure she could handle the procedure ok).
If the vet says it needs to be done, please listen. I waited a while with my cat beause several people told me horror stories about losing their cats after cleanings due to so much bacteria being released into their systems. Mine was finally at the point where she was losing weight and I was worried about what would happen if I didn’t get her teeth done. She’s an older cat, and I just wasn’t sure of the best course for her.
When the vet actually got in there, he found she had a type of mouth lesions peculiar to cats…the teeth grow where they aren’t supposed to and leave voids where there is supposed to be enamel. I felt HORRIBLY guilty for not finding out and getting her treated sooner.
After her cleaning, she is a whole new kitty. Energetic, more playful…you can tell she just feels better in general. Back to her old frisky, crumb-snatching self =^…^=
This is me restraining myself from a rant about the pet food industry and veterinary medicine.
…Long story short, yes, your cat should have its teeth cleaned if they’re really bad. They would likely never get that way in the first place if they weren’t eating cat food.
I took the Armadillo kitty in for some bloodwork a while back. The vet started giving me his prophylactic dentistry sales pitch before he even got to Poe’s mouth. When he looked in, he actually stopped mid-sentence and was like “…uh… his teeth look… very clean for his age…” Which is sad, considering Poe is approximately three, and an understatement considering his teeth look like a toothpaste commercial, if Crest were in the habit of employing cats for such things.
There are very few things I am really zealous about, but processed pet food is one of them… can you tell?
I don’t know about cats, because I’m violently allergic to them.
As for dogs, I like to go to down to the butcher shop or deer processor and get raw bones. They have to pay to have someone come and dispose of them, so they will let you take as much as you want. My dog loves them. They still have a small amount of meat still attached which is an extra treat. You will be surprised at how much they manage to grind down and ingest, but all that grinding results in sparkling white teeth.
Having lived in LA, I know how tough it is to find a butcher let alone a deer processor. But if you find one, you should be able to get some for free, or pay cheaply for ‘soup bones’.
Also I understand it’s best to give the bones raw. Cooking and baking weakens the bones, which might result in your dog swallowing a splintered piece.
Depending on the age of the cat, a substantial part of that may be bloodwork. It’s irresponsible to put an older animal under without checking for underlying liver and kidney disease, anemia, or infection. Depending on her overall health, part of it might also be for IV fluids to help buffer her system against the anesthesia.
And yes, you have to put animals under for a dental. We do all the stuff that human dentists do at a prophylactic cleaning–scaling off the tartar with an ultrasonic probe and then a hand scaler, probing the teeth and gums for looseness and decay, then polishing the teeth. If teeth are in really bad shape, we pull 'em. You might be willing to shove your hand into an awake cat’s mouth for all that, but most of us prefer to keep our fingers.
As for how bad it could be for your cat to have gunk on his teeth, how bad could it be for you to never get any dental care? Animals get gum disease and tooth decay just like humans do, and their teeth can rot right out of their little heads just like ours can. When their teeth are in really bad shape, it often becomes extremely painful for them and they have trouble eating, just like when you’ve got a toothache. And cats with dental disease are fairly prone to tooth root abcesses, where they get a big pocket of pus around the tooth root. That’s about as pleasant to deal with as it sounds, plus it tends to be fairly expensive.
What CrazyCatLady said. Our old cat Fluffy in her last year got very sick all of sudden, and refused to eat. We took her to the vets, thinking she’d have to be put to sleep-turns out she had several infected teeth which lead to a closed up throat. After she came home, she was back to being her old self again.
We also have a cat who has had the entire top row of her teeth pulled due to a genetic gum disease-it’s almost as if her gums are allergic to the teeth themselves. When they were flaring up, she wouldn’t eat and she was a nasty little bitch to everyone.
Toothaches HURT. See about a payment plan, but get Kitty’s teeth fixed.
Some cats simply seem more prone to this than others - ours is definitely one. We recently had this procedure done (and several teeth pulled) because her breath smelled so bad that you could smell her from feet away - it was a fishy, rotting smell. We could see that her teeth looked really nasty, so we asked about it at the dentist.
The total cost was around $250, and we specifically took her to one of the more uppity and attentive vets that we could find. The bulk of that was the anesthesia, but it also covered a few extractions.
Could it be that you’re living in a more expensive area? When we took her to the vet when we were living in DC, they quoted us $500+ for the process.
I love animals. I have two cats. I believe they are healthy, happy, and cared for. But they are cats, not children. $500 per annum just for tooth cleaning before any other vetinerary expenses? Nope.
If, in the course of their decade or so long life, they have sevious medical problems, I’ll pony up for the vet bills, based on how hard my son cries over them. But in the end, I have to pay the mortgage and put petrol in my car… a grand a year for clean teeth for two cats? Nope… I’l be telling my son the cats “ran away”. Goodnight nurse. It’s the way it is.
I can only assume that in the wild animals must get other creatures to give them free teeth cleaning. I would allow my cats to search out the free teeth cleaning creatures in the local bush.
Well, I can’t speak for Mixie, but the cats in my household get their food cooked at home. There are many recipes on the web and cat (and dog) food cookbooks available.
When my sister’s little male kitty started having bad bladder problems (due to his diet), she took him to a special vet who specialized in “alternative” medicine, including Chinese medicine. (This vet also practiced traditional vet medicine and was a partner in a “mainstream” vet’s office.) This vet gave my sister several approved recipes to help the kitty avoid foods that gave him problems. So far, so good.
Our kitties have been much healthier since they’ve been fed “home cooked” food. I wish I could provide cites to the best pet food recipe books, but my sister knows more about that than I do.
And getting back to the subject of the OP, yes, the cat needs to have her teeth cleaned. I am surprised that it is $500, though. One of my sister’s cats just had her teeth cleaned a few days ago, and it was under $100 (but that didn’t include blood work).
It’s very unlikely that you’d have to have their teeth cleaned, under anesthesia, every year. Many cleanings can be done by the vet during a regular appointment by scaling the teeth. It’s only when they get really bad, or the cat needs extractions, that you have to have the “big” expensive cleaning. This might happen a few times in the cat’s life. I’ve never seen a cat that needed a major cleaning every year (and they don’t need it anyway until they are probably more than 5 years old, at the earliest).
$500 does seem quite high to me, but that might just be the high end of the estimate.
I had one of my cats’ teeth done recently. They quoted me $350 but it only came out to about $280. $120 of that was just for the preliminary visit and the bloodwork, so the teeth cleaning, x-rays, and three extractions were only $160, which isn’t overly expensive in my opinion. (The original quote was higher because certain teeth are much harder to extract. My cat needed her two canine teeth taken out, which normally are expensive to remove because the roots are very deep. However, in her case, one tooth was out already and they just had to get the root; the other was very loose and they could get it out easily, and the other tooth was a small loose one that was also easy to pull out.)
If a cat gets an abcess, it can lead to a broken jaw if the tooth is lost.
Teeth provide a significant amount of structural strength in small dogs and cats.
Not getting the teeth cleaned could work out extremely expensive, wiring for the jawbone, lots of very careful feeding etc, never mind the cost of antibiotics, blood tests, etc.
Sorry, I always feel like I’m about to start writing a dissertation or something, so I tend to err on the side of talking less. All the carnivorous pets in the household get a prey model raw diet. The chewing, whether it’s on meat or bone, is what keeps their little choppers pearly white, but also the fact that they’re not getting species-inappropriate foods like the grain and rendered fats in dry cat food.
And before anyone says “but I barely have time to feed myself!” carnivores in the wild feed themselves pretty simply, and my dog and cats eat pretty simply, too. feeding time at our house looks something like this:
open fridge
grab hunk o’meat
hand out to cats and dog
Except for the fact that I have to cut stuff down to manageable portions, it takes an equal or less time and energy than scooping out a bowl of kibble, and I’ve got critters with clean teeth, sweet breath, not-unpleasant-smelling litter boxes, of normal cat weight, etc etc. Not to mention a puppy who doesn’t chew the house apart and doesn’t smell like a dog.
I got a postcard in the mail the other day from the vet that said something like “80% of companion animals have gum disease by the time they’re six months old!” This was supposed to entice me to bring them in for cleaning. Instead it makes me wonder why the vet community as a whole doesn’t step back and think “…maybe we’re dong something wrong”?
If you are unable to afford to care for your pet properly, and as a result the pet has serious health issues/extreme pain, then perhaps the best thing is to not have a pet at all.
