Cat dental care can be done the easy way or the hard way. When you listen to many veterinarians or specialised pet therapists, they will try to persuade you to clean your pets teeth either with a product they sell or with a toothbrush.
I don’t know about you, but trying to clean a cat’s teeth with a toothbrush seems to me to be inviting trouble. Your cat will probably, and righteously, react by scratching you. If that doesn’t work, you’ll likely get bitten for your troubles.
Clearly, they are telling us to back off. But do we listen? In our arrogance, we think we know best. I have learned the hard way that we most definitely don’t.
Chewing something manmade that claims to clean your cat’s teeth sounds dubious to me. The product is more likely to benefit the bank balance of the manufacture and supplier than your cat.
For a species that claims to be the most intelligent, humans can be remarkably stupid. Please don’t take offense at this, as that remark is not necessarily aimed at you. It is more aimed at the animal therapists (veterinarians mainly), who make their livlihood from giving you advice about caring for your cat.
However, being stupid can be very lucrative, as long as you can convince your followers that you are, in fact, very helpful.
Lets look at wild cats. Wild cats, in all their forms, don’t need toothbrushes or products that claim to clean their teeth. Wild cats already have a wonderful tooth cleaner built into every meal they consume – the bones of their prey.
Take a peak at your cats teeth and tell me if they are not perfectly suited to crunching up on small bones? This act keep their teeth clean, free from tartar, their gums nicely massaged and gives them a grand supply of macro minerals
I have to say that I am utterly gobsmacked by vets who tell you not to feed your cat bones. Certainly it does make very good business sense as the lack of bones in their diet creates lots of repeat business for them. Your cat will inevitably develop many mouth, and other health, problems.
Sadly, even many holistic practitioners and vets will tell you to grind up the bones before feeding them to your cat. They really haven’t fully embraced the way cats work naturally.
If you are feeling resistance to what I am saying about cat dental care, then you have been subjected to the very clever marketing psychology that abounds. I simply ask you to think laterally.
Consider this – cats in general cope very well when they turn feral. Throughout the world, whether in cold or hot countries, feral cats prosper. And the only way they can do that is because they are excellent hunters. And when they catch their prey, they eat everything, including the bones. Luckily for them, there is a large population of mice almost everywhere.
Humans seem to be very good at refusing to look at the cause of problems and instead keep creating ever more weird (and sometimes clever) devises that will never cure the problem. Your thinking needs to go back to the cause, not trying to manage the effect. Managing the effect simply creates more problems.
The easy way to cat dental care is to provide your cat with the where-with-all to do the cleaning themselves. However, there is one problem with this – most people have made their cats into junkies who refuse to eat real food. You’ll need help turning this around. Naturally Health Cats not only tells you how to change your cats diet, but what the healthiest diet is – as well as the easiest one.
