Cat dental care, your advice, please.

Claude is a 18 month old persian. He will only eat roast chicken from the supermarket and fresh minced meat.

At this check up at the Vet's last week.  The Vet informed that he had plaque build up on his teeth.

Claude will not eat any dry food. He will not eat any processed food. I also tried chicken necks, both cooked and fresh, without success.

Suggestions will be appreciated.

Kindly

Neville 

Home dental care such as brushing your cat's teeth Use only pet toothpaste. Pet stores sell toothpastes and toothbrushes. CET is a popular brand of toothpastes and dental products. You can find this online if your vet doesn't sell it.

Never ever give a cat cooked bones Cooked bones easily splinter which can cause injury to your cat's mouth and anywhere along the digestive tract if a splinter is ingested. Raw bones are fine.

What are you feeding your cat daily? Just the rotisserie chicken and fresh meat? That is not a complete balanced diet for a cat. Rotisserie chicken often contains garlic and onion and other seasonings which are harmful to cats as well. You can feed a homecooked or raw diet but it has to be done properly with all the necessary supplements added.

I personally oppose teeth brushing in cat, unless very specific condition is addressed or there is a geriatric cat.

The info about cat teeth brushing I came across is rather anecdotical.  For instance, using clorhexidine gel on cat's tooth is a nonsense and the "professional" explanation are lacunar, in one place is stressed the impact on bacteria and there was no indication on the 10 days only - which is rule in case of humans - and that is for a reason a.s.o.

Personally, I spent a lot of time in finding advises on the cat's diet, including reading first-hand scientific papers and I truly believe now that a good-quality food and physical activity are enough for an adult  cat to be healthy. And a professional vet control, of course. But I found out that not all vets are born equal :-)).

Finding un-biased info is really difficult and takes time. I am not very sure I avoided all marketing traps and all dubious info, even from the apparently trusted web-sites.

Thank you for this sage advice. Additionally can anyone suggest some foods that may trick and tempt Claude  into eating a more balanced diet?

kindly

Neville 

I feed my cat a raw chicken gizzard several times a week. He loves this treat and teeth are pearly white. My advice is to use scissors to cut it up into small pieces at first and work up to 2 or 3 large chunks over several weeks. This really gets the chewing action going to clean the teeth besides being a good source of taurine.

Neville said:

 
Thank you for this sage advice. Additionally can anyone suggest some foods that may trick and tempt Claude  into eating a more balanced diet?

kindly

Neville 

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Is your cat definitely against eating commerical cat foods? Have you tried canned foods that look good enough for a Human to eat, like Weruva and Tiki Cat?

A homemade cooked or raw diet isn't processed at all and your cat may like it. Try homecooked since yoru cat is already used to eating cooked meat. Please use one of the recipies listed here so your cat is getting all of the vitamins and minerals he needs in the right amounts: http://www.thecatsite.com/t/264153/home-cooked-cat-food-resources

Solomonar said:

 
I personally oppose teeth brushing in cat, unless very specific condition is addressed or there is a geriatric cat.

The info about cat teeth brushing I came across is rather anecdotical.  For instance, using clorhexidine gel on cat's tooth is a nonsense and the "professional" explanation are lacunar, in one place is stressed the impact on bacteria and there was no indication on the 10 days only - which is rule in case of humans - and that is for a reason a.s.o.

Personally, I spent a lot of time in finding advises on the cat's diet, including reading first-hand scientific papers and I truly believe now that a good-quality food and physical activity are enough for an adult  cat to be healthy. And a professional vet control, of course. But I found out that not all vets are born equal :-)).

Finding un-biased info is really difficult and takes time. I am not very sure I avoided all marketing traps and all dubious info, even from the apparently trusted web-sites.

Click to expand...

Sorry could you clarify? I'm not sure I understand the 10 day only rule? Why is brushing cat's teeth bad? In layman terms please lol.

Brushing cat;s teeth is not necesarly bad. But chances are to be useless anyway.

Have a look on the same problem in humans: see how difficult is to correctly brush the teeth (and we have far less complicated teeth formula, we us the toothbroosh on our own mouth etc.-In reality, one care barely find a person who brush the teeth in a correct way.).

Clorhexidine forms a sort of matrix on the teeth's surface, that prevent plaque to form. It also de-structure the mouth flora. But shall be used only 10 days in a row, then it has to be stopped for another 20 days. And so on. It is not something to be used by everybody. Only persons with documented gum or peridont conditions shall use it. It shall  kept for only 60 seconds in the mouth and shall not be swallowed.

When looking on the advises on the web-sites it looks like every cat shall have the teeth brushed. There are also piles of myths concerning "removal of the plaque" by various tooth paste and routines. Same marketing as for humans, btw...

I am not saying that brushing the cat's teeth is absolutely useless. I am saying that there are big chances to be useless. To have an impact it shall be done timely and correctly. I would not fool myself in believing that as long as doing the same "timely and correctly" in humans is so difficult, I can have more chances on the cat's teeth. 

Note that brushing teeth is not abrasion.  There are other physical processes (not abrasion!) that clean the tooth surface when brushing. The only thing that a cat teeth brush can do is to remove the leftovers. For myself I use o 15.000 soft filaments toothbrush and some imbricated routins invoving waterpick and flossing - as advised by the dentist. I dare to say that is not that easy.

Ok, for some people incorrect brushing alone may be useful - for instance as a consequence of increasing the saliva volume. Does this "good result from an incorrect procedure" apply to the cat? I do not know, but I doubt because cat do not chew in the literal meaning.

And I would also refrain myself to drop clorhexidine (or to ad gel) in the cat's mouth, without knowing in a scientific way that this helps and does not do even more damage. Primum non nocere.

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Different story in a cat showing various teeth, gum or peridont conditions, or geriatric cat or cat on certain nutrients deprivation - exceptional cases anyway.

For all others, (very) good quality food and periodic scaling may be a safer choice. 

By gel you mean the pet toothpaste, yes?

One web-site states something about placing gel in the cat mouth. I suppose is about "creaming" the gum with gel which contains clorhexidine. It does not matter to much whether cloprhexidine comes with the toothpaste or separately as a gel. Important is the fact the clorhexidine is placed in the mouth.

Also note that whenever use clorhexidine, SLS shall not be present in the tooth paste, because it destroys the matrix.

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When I said "for myself" I referred to my own mouth, not to my cat :-)