Senior cats are particularly vulnerable to dental disease, with oral health maintenance becoming increasingly important for comfort and systemic health in later life.
Senior cat dental care requires overcoming two common barriers — owner concern about anaesthesia risk and failure to recognise dental pain. The anaesthetic risk concern is understandable but often overstated in otherwise healthy senior cats when appropriate pre-anaesthetic assessment is performed. The failure to recognise dental pain is a welfare failure that allows chronic suffering to continue unnecessarily. Post-extraction quality of life improvement — often described by owners as "like having a different cat" — demonstrates the magnitude of welfare impairment that untreated dental disease causes.