Dental health is incredibly influential on your dog’s overall health. It is important for your dog to maintain proper dental hygiene and protect its gums and teeth from deterioration. However, this can be a difficult task to achieve at home. Therefore, many dog owners choose to take their dogs to a groomer to clean their teeth.

While this is a wonderful idea, groomers can actually only perform surface-level dental care for a few reasons. In this article, we’ll explore the various techniques that groomers do use and the ones that they should not, as well as more in-depth dental care alternatives for your pup.

How do Groomers Clean Dog’s Teeth?

Groomers primarily clean dog’s teeth by brushing. However, there are also some groomers that perform ultrasound teeth cleaning.

Tooth Brushing

Most of the time, groomers will clean your dog’s teeth by simply brushing their teeth. Since this can be a huge hassle at home, most dog owners are pleased with this part of the service.

However, you should note that while your groomer can brush your dog’s teeth and do surface-level dental health care, they cannot do more advanced techniques such as those that require anesthetics.

When it comes to removing plaque and tartar from your dog’s teeth, this is absolutely not the job of a groomer. This procedure can be incredibly painful for your dog without the proper anesthetics and tools, so it should only be done by a trained veterinarian.

If your groomer attempts to remove the plaque or tartar themselves, it could inflict pain on your dog and cause severe damage to the enamel of its teeth. Luckily, if your dog has a lot of tarter, you can remove tarter with apple cider.

If you want to clean your dog’s teeth by yourself, you should check out this canine dental chart.

Ultrasound Teeth Cleaning

Some doggie groomers may choose to use ultrasound technology to clean your dog’s teeth. It should be noted that not all groomers will be able to perform this service. By using ultrasound toothbrushes and toothpaste, the groomers are able to penetrate the gum line to remove deeply buried germs and bacteria residing within the gums.

By removing this bacteria inside of the gums, overall plaque and germ buildup on the teeth themselves will significantly decrease. Furthermore, ultrasound cleaning promotes healthy gums by increasing blood flow within the gums. Some of the benefits of ultrasound teeth cleaning include avoiding general anesthetics.

In most cases, anesthetics must be given to your dog when cleaning its teeth in order to ensure proper and full cleaning. However, with ultrasound technology, anesthetics are not required as there is no vibration or noise that would frighten your dog.

Limitations to Groomers Dental-Care

Simply put, dog dental health is outside of the scope of expertise of groomers. It typically requires special training and techniques that are only known and practiced by vets. Groomers should not be attempting to do dental care outside of surface-level basic or ultrasound.

Anything else, including removing plaque and tartar, is far too advanced for groomers. These procedures require specialized training and techniques. If a groomer is advertising plaque and tartar removal services, you should look elsewhere.

At best, it will result in lackluster dental care for your dog. At worst, your dog may end up with severe pain and damage to its teeth and gums. Therefore, it is a much better option to go to your veterinarian for in-depth dental care. Groomers can, however, brush your dog’s teeth.

This can be a helpful service that contributes to your dog’s dental health. But outside of tooth brushing, you should visit your veterinarian rather than a groomer. Save your time and your money by avoiding groomers who promise deep teeth cleaning for your dogs altogether.

Final Thoughts

It can be tempting to add a deep cleaning service to your grooming service. However, this is a poor decision. Deep tooth cleaning services should be reserved solely for veterinarians who are trained and practiced. Your groomer can provide tooth brushing services and surface-level dental care work.

They can use traditional tooth brushing techniques or more technologically advanced techniques like ultrasound tooth brushing. However, avoid any groomers who are providing more in-depth dental services as these could be detrimental to your dog.

Overall, limit your groomers to traditional grooming services and surface-level dental work like tooth brushing. While oral hygiene is very important for dogs and definitely something all dog owners should invest time into taking care of, groomers are typically not the solution.

Visit your veterinarian for in-depth dental care while reserving surface-level work like tooth brushing for you or your groomer.