Dental Daily Sticks

Dental disease is the most common thing a vet finds in a dog over three, and the least often acted on by owners. A daily stick will not clear existing tartar and it is not as good as a toothbrush, but it is the intervention people will actually keep up for a year, which is why we stock it.

The shape does the work. Deep longitudinal ridges force the tooth through the material rather than letting a dog crunch it in two, and the texture is firm enough to scrape the gum line without being hard enough to risk a slab fracture. Chew time is about five minutes for a medium dog.

Count the calories. One medium stick is roughly 85 kcal, a meaningful slice of a small dog's day. Take it out of dinner rather than adding it on top, and step down a size if your dog is between two.

If there is already brown tartar at the gum line, or the breath has gone genuinely bad, that is a scale-and-polish under anaesthetic and no chew is going to fix it. Book the vet, then start the daily habit afterwards on clean teeth where it can actually help.