My Dog Has Bad Breath - Should I Be Worried?

By Joshua Adams

If you smelled the of breath of five dogs there is a very good chance that four of five dogs will have very bad breath. Because it is such a common condition many dog owners feel that it's acceptable that their dog has bad breath and this is the very reason why many dog owners don't do anything about it. If your dog has bad breath then it could be a sign that there is poor oral hygiene or it could be an alarm for an underlying issue.

If you search the Internet for dog bad breath causes you will find that majority of the information is related to poor oral hygiene where 90% of the time that is true but it cannot be neglected that there are some instances where the bad breath is a result or symptom of a major underlying illness.

By missing the signs of an illness you run the risk of making your dog even more ill.

Common question is what causes dog bad breath other than poor oral hygiene? Well, there are two major things that need to be considered. The first thing is factors like parasites, food allergies, stomach ulcers, poisoning and the second issue is illnesses like liver failure, kidney failure, diabetes, and lung cancer. Now, as you can see that there is more to bad breath than just some tartar build up and your dog's bad breath is telling you that there is something wrong.

Now the big question is how can you tell if your dog's bad breath is due to poor oral hygiene or is it due to an illness.

Unfortunately, it is not as straight forward as that, it is quite difficult to judge yourself what is the cause of bad breath but there are two things that you can do to check if you need to take your dog to the vet for further examination.

The first thing that you need to do is try and see if the smell is coming from your dog's mouth and the way you would do this is by closing your dog's mouth and smelling his/her breath directly from the nose when it is exhaled. Another thing what you want to do is take a good look inside your dog's mouth and see if you can spot cement like build up on the teeth or if you can see red, puffy bloody gums rather than firm pink gums then you need to take your dog to see a vet.