Feline Teeth Removal
The Full Operational Procedure

Removing feline teeth is a long operation.  These two videos follow the process fromanaesthesia to completion and are really designed for the professional cat veterinarian.

Stage 1: Explaining the procedure

  • Because Pixie is a young cat I have used a little Methadone and a little Domitor as anaesthetics. I am a great believer that the most Feline Friendly approach to operations like this is to keep Fluffy under for as short a time as possible.
  • An extra step I always take – and highly recommend – is to clip her nails.  It settles the cat and helps distract her from any idea that anything unusual is about to happen.
  • The procedure involves drilling out the back teeth – just the molars.  I leave the canines for face shape and defense.
  • The teeth are loosened with Periosteal Elevators then removed with tooth forceps. 50% of cat’s teeth break as you remove them so we end up using many different sized drill bits to drill the remaining teeth out,.  I demonstrate the types of drill bit in more detail in the first video.
  • Purists will tell you that you shouldn’t burr out remaining tooth roots because it causes the tooth to be smashed into the jawbone however, I have been doing this long enough to say that, as a practical solution it works very well.  The cat’s mouth and jaw are much happier with no teeth in there and I spend some time explaining this in the video as well.

Applying feline anaesthetics

Stage 2: Removing Pixie’s teeth

In Pixies case a lot of the tooth enamel has eroded and the gum is attempting to fix it.  But it can’t do that because it just erodes more gum away.

The gum is inflamed and bleeding so the first step is to trim the gum back and scale and polish the front teeth to preserve face shape and defense. It’s called Crown Lengthening when humans do it!

I always do all the teeth in one operation because it is less stressful on the cat and gives the cat a longer benefit.

The total operation is well over an hour and you don’t want to put a cat through that level of stress so, when you can – it’s one out – all out.