Thirty years ago, nobody would have ever dreamed of having the family dog's teeth cleaned!
So what happened?
Dog food happened. Commercially prepared dogfood in cans -- and at first, that wasn't a bad thing. It was handy. Ir was convenient. You gave your dog canned food, and you supplemented it with table scraps and bones.
Then, conglomerates happened. Big companies swallowed small companies. Managers realized that pet food was big busines, and some bright MBA figured out there were more profits to be made from dry pet food than from tinned pet food. Billions of advertising dollars were spent in an effort to persuade people that these dried foods were "better". Part of the campaign consisted of bad-mouthing things like table scraps, raw meat and bones. Table scraps aren't healthy and raw meat can give your dog tapeworms, we were told. Worse, bone splinters can lodge in your dog's intestines and kill him. Yikes.
So we stopped giving our dogs table scraps, raw meat and bones.
And now our dogs need to have their teeth cleaned. Under anesthetic, no less. Why? Because dogs are carnivores, genetically engineered to eat raw meat and bones.
I'm guilty. I listened to the "expert" advice and tried to follow the trends, but Bao was smarter than I was. He wouldn't touch canned dog food, and he'd rather starve then eat the dry stuff. But I did stop giving him bones, because I was scared a splinter would lodge in his intestines, and he would die. So he developed tartar, and that's probably why he's got the heart condition. The tartar breaks away, enters the blood stream and causes heart disease.
Please, throw out the kibble and feed your dog raw meat. And give him bones. More dogs die under anesthesia having their teeth cleaned than because a bone has lodged in thieir intestines. As for raw meat, you can cure a tapeworm with a pill, but at this writing, canine mitral valve disease is a death sentence.