Shark mouth

Recently I had a dog in for a spay. During her pre-surgical exam, we discovered that she had retained baby teeth. Luckily my AHT, Kelly, was able to contact her owner to get permission to remove the teeth.

In this particular situation, the main issue is the canine teeth erupting to the inside of the baby teeth on the bottom jaw. In a normal mouth, the adult teeth come up under the baby teeth and they fall out. This dog apparently hadn’t read the book on what was supposed to happen. Hopefully the adult teeth will start to move sideways so they do not hit the hard palate when she eats. In some cases, the dogs need to be referred to a veterinary dental specialist for shortening of the tooth and root canals. Not an inexpensive option!

We should know over the summer whether the bottom canine teeth will be an issue for her or not.

Surgical Surprises

This week we had a couple of surprises when it came to our surgeries. The first one had the owners, staff and I laughing. A new client brought in the families new 16 week old kitten to be neutered. They had been told it was a male but the kids wanted to call him Dolly. When we are admitting for surgery we always double check just to be sure. Well…..turns out he was actually a she and the kids had found the perfect name!

The other neat find was when we were getting ready to do a spay on a 6 month old small breed dog. My AHT, Kelly, asked me to take a quick peak at the mouth as there were some retained baby teeth. There were five upper baby incisors that needed to come out but the bottom teeth were the most intriguing. There were only three adult incisors (supposed to have six) and the baby canine teeth hadn’t fallen out which was causing the adult teeth to erupt to the inside of the mouth.

This can become a major problem. If we did not remove the baby teeth, the adult teeth would continue to erupt improperly and would end up damaging the hard palate. My mouth hurt just thinking about what could happen. I took a quick dental radiograph to make sure nothing else was going on in the lower jaw.

Once I was done with the routine spay, I extracted the baby teeth. This is the one time we do not suture the incisions closed. We want to give the adult teeth every chance to move outward to their normal position.