Told by vet to brush cats teeth...are they mad?

[CucumberCool]

Really? This is a thing?! How on earth do I do it!

I wasn't the one at the apt I should add...

Do you do it?

My teenaged child saw this nonsense on TikTok or the like and asked me to buy a cat tooth brush. Best £2.50 I ever spent 😂The cat definitely won that one and it was never mentioned again.

Cats in the wild just get rotten infected teeth and either suffer with the pain or die of hunger/infection. Presuming they live that long; bad teeth tends to be an issue in older cats and domestic cats live far longer than feral ones.

I tried from when mine were kittens, but they were never on for it (& they let me rub their tummies/wipe their noses/clean their eyegunk/fix their claws as they’re shedding etc) so they just eat the toothpaste (this brand works without brushing, not all do). I also add [different] stuff to their food & water; as well as feeding them a split of high-quality dry & wet food.

My ginger cat has still had to have a tooth out though - after he was first diagnosed with kidney issues the vet gave me renal food for him. Like an utter eejit I trusted that, being from the vet, it would be healthy. The stuff was full of sugar, & my poor wee boy, who’d the genetic short straw dentally as well as renally, ended up losing a tooth & being really quite poorly with it.

Wow really great to hear all the stories and read the advice. A Lot to try. Thanks everyone! 😺

we feed our little guy those dental life treats - he absolutely loves & they are pretty much the only treat he actually crunches rather than inhaling whole

There is no way we could clean our cat's teeth and live to tell the tale.

The answer for us has been to offer a few Purina Dentalife Daily Oral Care Treats after each wet food meal. Our cat can't eat dry food as it is usually not chewed and is then brought back up. Dentalife are the only biscuits or treats our cat always crushes up before swallowing, and they stay down as well as being good for teeth.

I came here hoping to find at least one person say their adult cat had accepted this! 🤣

We attempt to brush our cats teeth. He gets very excited when the toothpaste comes out because he likes the flavour and sees it as a treat....but he does try to just eat the brush and I'm not entirely convinced we ever manage to really brush a tooth but he does get a good mouthful of toothpaste!

I get them cleaned approx yearly at the vet in lieu of this. I've tried. Nobody is into it. I do the (much bigger) dogs but the cats are a hard pass.

My vet mentioned this to me at Dcat's last appointment. I assumed that they had been at the ketamine.

Me too. Penelope had 6 Teeth out last week. £877. 😱

I was given some toothpaste for Cheddar, she was pretty amenable to it, until she tasted it. Bizarrely it was vanilla flavour. and she clearly really didn't like the taste. I suspect she might have been ok with meat/ fish flavour. But I wasn't spending another £20 to find out!

ASBO’s liquid antibiotics were pineapple flavour. Even the vet thought it odd.

Cant help but think it was a paeds medication 😂

Oh my god 😮
I'd end up with severe lacerations. Especially if he starts having one of his 'funny 5 minutes' where he looks like he wants a head scratch, but actually wants to full-on body wrestle, bite and pulverise my arm. Peppered with little purrs in between, whilst his talons are still sunk in my flesh...
And his claws are about 6 inches long, he's like a Komodo dragon in a cat suit. Stupid trusting human, I fall for it every time though 😂

Never heard this suggested for any of the cats I have ever known (friends and family included) which is lucky because think many of those people wouldn’t have all their fingers by now…

Posey had to have crunchy biscuit things to help her teeth when she was younger (as suggested by one vet) but when we moved area and she had a new vet, they never mentioned her teeth at all and then she ended up on wet renal cat food to help her kidneys but her teeth were never mentioned again.

I have had cats all my life and this has never been suggested to me by any vet! Good luck to this who try is all I can say!🙈

I don't have a cat or a veterinary degree and even I can tell this idea is batshit

I know this is a zombie thread but I don't think this is necessarily true. We need our cats for pest control and they catch rats, mice and rabbits and eat the whole animal. I check their teeth regularly and they are always spotlessly clean so perhaps something about crunching up bones keeps their teeth clean and I suppose lots of cats don't do this.

I keep trying with my kitty as it's extremely important to their overall health. Tooth problems lead in turn to thyroid and particularly kidney problems and you can lose them at a younger age than you would if they had good teeth.

It's not easy but definitely worth persevering.

My beautiful boy has had two rounds of general anaesthetic (deep clean and extractions both times) in the last couple of years, just shy of £1k spent and his breath still stinks and he still drools 'mucky' coloured drool (which, as he likes to sleep with his face on mine is pretty grim)... The vet said to try brushing his teeth to delay the need for more work but I'm going to make him hate me aren't I?

Yep I was that soldier. Big towel gardening gloves and into the breach . I had to do one of mine as he had FIV and was susceptible to infection.

When he passed and I acquired a few moggies with attitude I left it. I like my skin too much

Well it's really interesting to hear all your war stories!

I never did, I just brought the royal canon dental food instead and last vet trip they said no issues with teeth at all. Seems to have done the job...

"de-claw" aka mutilate. It's the equivalent of amputating all your fingers and toes just below where the fingernails start. Cats mutilated in this way often experience pain walking and using the litter tray.

I'm very glad that we don't do that here.

I posted at the beginning that we did it. We've stopped now. It's definitely affected our relationship with him as he runs away when we try to pick him up now. He used to be such a cuddly cat. Totally regret trying and wish him we'd just given the dental biscuits and not done the brushing.

My sister brushes her cats teeth every day. One of them can be pretty violent and she didn't start with him till he was about 3. He actually likes it now, but she is very determined and persistent. She started after getting a very large bill for dental treatment