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If you’re thinking of getting or currently own a puppy or kitten three-months-old or younger, then you’re soon in for a somewhat bizarre experience: teething. Puppies begin losing their baby teeth around four or five months old, and kittens also do so around the same time. Though sometimes later; my cat didn’t start teething until six months or so.
I said bizarre experience because although it makes perfect sense that pets would lose their baby teeth and grow adult ones just like humans, I didn’t quite anticipate it when first adopting a puppy. I prepared for all the things I would need to do for my new puppy, from housebreaking to dealing with separation anxiety, but I didn’t exactly prepare for Chihiro to start teething.
That’s not to say I was shocked when her teeth started falling out. Thanks to the many puppy books I read before adopting, I soon learned that teething would be yet another one of the many experiences I’d go through with my new puppy. Still, I did experience some surprise when I first read that Chihiro would teethe in a month or so, though that feeling was immediately followed by the thought “oh yeah, well, of course.”
I’m writing about this today to help prepare other current or future baby pet owners for their pets’ teething experience. Fortunately, we don’t need to do a lot to help our baby animals through the process; it’s certainly easier than when a baby starts teething, if for no other reason than teething puppies and kittens don’t tend to scream the way baby humans do.
We can, however, take a page from a baby book when our puppies teethe. Around the time Chihiro’s baby teeth started falling out, she had amongst her playthings a little rope toy. To help soothe her, and distract her from things around the house she might chew instead, I soaked the rope and put it in the freezer. Once it became very cold, I gave it to Chihiro.
When I told my mother that I’d done that, she laughed. She said that was almost the exact same thing she’d done for me when I was teething, only that she used a plastic baby toy instead of a rope.
I ended up wishing that maybe I’d used another sort of toy than a rope to freeze and give to Chihiro. Because she chewed it while her baby teeth fell out, the rope became so gross and bloody that I threw it in the washer a few times. Still, getting a frozen chew toy seemed to help Chihiro a bit.
Other than that, however, I didn’t really need to do anything differently for Chihiro. During the in-between stage when she had very few teeth it would take Chihiro much longer to chew through a treat than it did otherwise, but that didn’t change how I fed her.
As for Cole, I barely noticed when he was teething. I wouldn’t have noticed anything different except that I found the occasional baby tooth by his food bowl.
Basically, the main thing you have to prepare for when your pets teethe is the kind of gross experience of finding sometimes bloody teeth lying around the house. You can provide your pets, especially your puppies, with something to chew, but luckily with pets for the most part you can just let nature take its course in teething.
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