Sometimes people email me and they say that they’d rather see MORE blog posts, rather than posts of a higher quality. I can dig that, and so today, I give you: a blog post about dog teeth.
A couple of months ago we noticed
that Baxter had some bad tartar on some of his teeth and some really foul breath, which I guess I would too if I did this all day and never brushed my teeth:
Since
he’s 6 ½ years old and we though his teeth might start to fall out if they got any dirtier, we figured that some dog tooth cleaning was probably
in order. I actually started out as one of those people who brushed
their dog’s teeth with the chicken-flavored toothpaste and the long toothbrush, but as I’m
sure you can imagine, more pressing things got in the way of this delightful
pastime, like how much he really didn’t like it when I stuck the long
toothbrush in his mouth, or how he tried to get away from me, or generally
how I have better things to do than try to wrestle a dog to the ground
in order to brush his teeth for him with some chicken-flavored toothpaste. He doesn’t want me to do
it, okay? That should tell you something.
But then I took him to the
vet for something else, and that vet was like “hey, your dog’s teeth are
pretty scrungy,” which I guess is pretty bad coming from a vet.
I wasn’t nuts about the idea of them having to knock him out to do
the cleaning, though, because, well, he’s sensitive, and it makes me
sad when he’s sick. So, I might have been putting it off, or
waiting for a better solution.
As it turns out, because this
is L.A., there is an alternative! My dog daycare / boarding place
just started offering a no-anesthesia tooth cleaning, and I’m not
even kidding, it’s like a dog tartar miracle happened. We picked
him up after San Francisco, his teeth were clean, and he wasn’t even
traumatized. I even took a picture on the way home, so you could
see the true dog tooth splendor.
Is this more amazing if you
know that the fancy L.A. no-anesthesia dog teeth cleaning lady first
whips some kind of hypnotic mojo on the dogs to get them to sit still?
Yeah, apparently she has this chair, and she sits in it with them, and
then she lasers off all the plaque, and the dog keeps this stoopid grin on his face the whole time. I’m so impressed with this, I want her to be my dentist. Honestly, I don’t usually buy into these sorts of Los Angeles specific fancy dog things, mainly because Baxter is really big and would look ridiculous in a designer sweatshirt. Actually, someone at the dog park told me
they go to a vet who also does dog acupuncture, but that might be where
I draw the line.
Probably not, though.
Did you know we drove the dog cross-country when we moved from New York?
Yeah. We did. And it was fun.