Anesthesia-free dentistry, or non-professional dental scaling, can be extremely dangerous for pets, for a number of reasons.
Most pets won’t lie still during a dental cleaning, so there is a strong risk of injuring the pet’s gums and other soft tissue in the mouth. This can be a frightening experiencs as well as a painful one if your pet has abscessed teeth. A frightened pet could also bite the clinician.
Even if your pet could be trained to remain completely still for all the scraping and noise of the procedure, his or her teeth need to be cleaned under the gums, where tartar and dental disease can hide. This process is uncomfortable, but is essential to obtaining the health benefits of dental cleaning, which is why pets should be anesthetized. Dental, or periodontal, disease begins in the spaces under the gums where the teeth and gums meet. In addition, not all teeth can be reached and cleaned in an awake patient. Cleaning just the visible surfaces of the teeth only makes owners feel like their pets’ teeth are clean, when in reality, dental disease is still trapped under the gumline.
Your pet also needs to be ventilated during the procedure. Ventilation keeps your pet’s airway open and keeps tartar from potentially ending up in his or her lungs, where it can actually kill your pet.
The cosmetic cleaning that a pet would get from a non-professional scaling just isn’t worth your efforts. You don’t improve the health of your pet, and the money paid is lost as well when it could be utilized in benefiting your pet’s health.