Greyhound teeth and why they need extra care

Gum disease is the most common health problem vets record in pet Greyhounds. In UK vet records, 39% of Greyhounds were diagnosed with periodontal disease in a single year, more than any other condition in the breed and about four times the rate reported across all dogs (O'Neill and colleagues, 2019). Many arrive as retired racers with the disease under way, and their dentals need more planning than most dogs'.

Plaque turns into gum disease the same way in every breed, and once the damage reaches the bone it can't be undone, as our guide to periodontal disease in dogs explains. What differs in Greyhounds is how common it is and what a dental involves for them.

A big dog with a small dog's dental record

Gum disease is usually a small-dog problem, for reasons set out in why small dogs have worse teeth. The Greyhound breaks the pattern. VetCompass, a Royal Veterinary College project that reads anonymized UK vet records, found periodontal disease in 1,060 of 2,715 Greyhounds in 2016. The next most common problem, overgrown nails, was at 11%.

Other big breeds look nothing like this, with 4.1% of German Shepherd Dogs and about 3% of Rottweilers in earlier VetCompass studies. In a later study of 22,333 UK dogs, the Greyhound had the highest rate of any breed, 32%, and 2.58 times the odds of a crossbred once age and size were allowed for (O'Neill and colleagues, 2021). The Lurcher, a Greyhound cross, had 1.93 times the odds.

The long face doesn't explain it, because long-faced breeds as a group had no higher odds. The authors suggest gaps between teeth along a long jaw, genes and life before retirement, and none of these is proven. They also note that the Greyhounds in the 2019 study were fairly old, 7.6 years on average, which may push the 39% up, though gum disease was still the breed's most common condition.

Ex-racers and the mouth they arrive with

Many pet Greyhounds in Ireland and the UK started on the track, and researchers point to two possible causes from that life. Racing kennels commonly feed a non-solid diet, and dental care is often missing during rearing and racing careers (Rooney and colleagues, 2021). A 2016 House of Commons committee report, cited in the VetCompass study, found that 14% of the money given to the Greyhound Trust went on dental treatment.

The same Bristol group found that some Greyhounds had red, inflamed gums with little tartar, and others heavy tartar over gums that looked fine. Clean-looking teeth don't rule out gum disease. How much bone has gone only shows on X-rays under anesthesia, and our guide to the stages of periodontal disease explains what each stage means for a tooth.

If you have just adopted a retired racer, we suggest a vet dental check in the first few weeks, even if the rehoming group had the teeth cleaned.

Count the teeth

Many Greyhounds have more than the usual 42 adult teeth. In a study of 55 Greyhounds, 20 had at least one extra tooth, 36%, most often an extra first premolar in the upper jaw (Dole and Spurgeon, 1998). An extra tooth crowds its neighbors, and plaque packs into the tight gap.

Lift the upper lip on each side and look just behind the long canine. Two small pointed teeth where you'd expect one is worth pointing out at the next check, and an X-ray shows whether it needs to come out.

Brushing a Greyhound

Daily brushing is the best home care, and it has been tested on this breed. When kennel staff brushed 160 racing Greyhounds for two months, only daily brushing calmed the gums, and it took about two minutes a dog. The incisors, the small front teeth, showed no clear change with brushing (Rooney and colleagues, 2021).

A Greyhound's long muzzle makes the back teeth easy to reach and the front ones easy to skip.

• Brush with your dog standing or lying on its side, whichever it settles in.
• Cup the muzzle from below and lift the thin lip with your thumb, then work a soft brush in small circles at about 45 degrees to the gumline.
• Finish on the incisors. With the mouth closed, lift the upper lip at the front and brush up and down, then pull the lower lip down and do the same.
• Use dog toothpaste only.

Chews help alongside brushing. If you give bones, give raw, soft ones such as chicken necks, sized so your dog has to chew, and supervise. Cooked bones splinter, and dense leg bones and antlers can crack teeth. Wash hands and surfaces after raw chicken.

While a newly adopted Greyhound gets used to the brush, a powder stirred into its dinner asks nothing of the dog. Caniclean is our seaweed powder for that, and it helps reduce plaque and new tartar at the amount the pack gives for your dog's weight. One reviewer, Ann-Sophie Wante, had tried dried meat first. "Despite giving dried meat on a daily basis to clean his teeth, Storm kept having plaque and a stinky breath," she wrote on November 21, 2023, about a dog whose breed she doesn't give. The powder only reaches plaque that forms after you start. Tartar that has already hardened needs a scale under anesthesia, and gum and bone that disease has taken stay lost.

Before the dental, what to ask your vet

Cleaning below the gumline, X-rays and extractions all need a general anesthetic, and the general risk for any dog is set out in our guide to whether anesthesia is safe for a dental cleaning. AAHA advises the first full cleaning by age 2 in large dogs. Cleaning without anesthesia only scrapes the visible tooth, and the American Veterinary Dental College recommends against it. Anesthesia in sighthounds has been studied for decades, and the plan for a Greyhound differs from other dogs' in four ways.

The first is the drugs. Given thiopental-type anesthetics, racing Greyhounds took three to four times as long as mixed-breed dogs of similar weight to stand up, and some took more than eight hours (Robinson and colleagues, 1986). Low body fat was long blamed, but later work points to the liver. Greyhounds make less of CYP2B11, an enzyme that clears these drugs, and are more likely than any of the other 63 breeds tested to carry a variant that turns it down (Martinez and colleagues, 2020). Thiopental is avoided in sighthounds, and propofol, which Greyhounds also clear more slowly, is given with that in mind (Court, 1999; Zoran and colleagues, 1993).

The second is warmth. A lean dog, with a lot of skin surface for its weight, loses heat fast under anesthesia, so its temperature needs watching into recovery (Court, 1999).

The third is the blood test. Healthy Greyhounds have more red cells and higher creatinine than other dogs, and fewer platelets and less thyroid hormone (Zaldívar-López and colleagues, 2011). On a standard range a healthy Greyhound can look as if it has a kidney or thyroid problem. In an Irish study, 42 of 46 healthy young Greyhounds had thyroid hormone (total T4) below the general dog range (Shiel and colleagues, 2007).

The fourth is bleeding a day or two later, even when standard clotting tests are normal (Lara-García and colleagues, 2008). In a trial in 100 retired racers having a spay or castration, 30% of dogs on a placebo bled 36 to 48 hours after surgery, against 10% given aminocaproic acid, a drug that stops clots breaking down too early (Marín and colleagues, 2012). Of the Greyhounds tested in a 2025 study, 29% carried two copies of a gene variant used to flag this risk, the highest share of any breed (Court and colleagues, 2025). These studies were on neutering. Nobody has measured the rate after extractions, though that paper names dental procedures as a trigger.

• Do you use a sighthound protocol, and which drug will you use to put my dog under?
• Will the blood results be read against Greyhound ranges?
• How will you keep my dog warm, and who stays with it until it's fully awake?
• If teeth come out, do you plan for delayed bleeding, and what should I watch for over the next three days?

When to see the vet

The lip lift you do to count teeth is also the moment to look for trouble. Red or bleeding gums, brown tartar at the gumline, a loose tooth or breath that stays bad all need a booked vet check, and so does a Greyhound that drops food, chews on one side or pulls its head away from your hand. A swollen face or a dog that won't eat is a same-day visit. In the days after a dental, ring the clinic straight away if bruising spreads under the jaw or a socket starts bleeding again.

Human painkillers are off the list for a sore mouth. The FDA says anti-inflammatories made for people may harm dogs, and acetaminophen can injure a dog's liver.

Any seaweed supplement, Caniclean included, adds iodine to the diet. Ask your vet first if your Greyhound has a thyroid or kidney condition, is pregnant or is a young puppy. A Greyhound already on thyroid tablets stays on them as prescribed. Healthy Greyhounds so often test low on T4 that it is fair to ask whether the diagnosis used Greyhound ranges.

Common questions

Why do Greyhounds have such bad teeth? Nobody knows for sure. Researchers suggest a mix of genes, gaps between teeth in a long jaw, soft kennel diets and little dental care during a racing career.

Do all retired racing Greyhounds need dental work? Not all, but gum disease is recorded in about 4 in 10 pet Greyhounds a year, so book a dental check soon after adoption.

Do Lurchers and Whippets have the same problem? Both had raised odds in UK vet records, 1.93 times a crossbred's for Lurchers and 1.74 for Whippets, against 2.58 for Greyhounds.

References

• American Veterinary Dental College. Companion animal dental scaling without anesthesia, position statement.
• Bellows J, Berg ML, Dennis S, et al. 2019 AAHA Dental Care Guidelines for Dogs and Cats. Journal of the American Animal Hospital Association 2019;55(2):49-69. doi:10.5326/JAAHA-MS-6933.
• Court MH. Anesthesia of the sighthound. Clinical Techniques in Small Animal Practice 1999;14(1):38-43. doi:10.1016/S1096-2867(99)80025-5.
• Court MH, Hardy M, Forbes KR, Yang H, Jimenez TP. Delayed postoperative hemorrhage (DEPOH) in an Irish Wolfhound with the SERPINF2 c.605 T/T genotype: case description and variant prevalence across dog breeds. Frontiers in Veterinary Science 2025;12:1609780. doi:10.3389/fvets.2025.1609780.
• Dole RS, Spurgeon TL. Frequency of supernumerary teeth in a dolichocephalic canine breed, the greyhound. American Journal of Veterinary Research 1998;59(1):16-17. doi:10.2460/ajvr.1998.59.01.16.
• Lara-García A, Couto CG, Iazbik MC, Brooks MB. Postoperative bleeding in retired racing greyhounds. Journal of Veterinary Internal Medicine 2008;22(3):525-533. doi:10.1111/j.1939-1676.2008.0088.x.
• Marín LM, Iazbik MC, Zaldivar-Lopez S, Guillaumin J, McLoughlin MA, Couto CG. Epsilon aminocaproic acid for the prevention of delayed postoperative bleeding in retired racing greyhounds undergoing gonadectomy. Veterinary Surgery 2012;41(5):594-603. doi:10.1111/j.1532-950X.2012.00965.x.
• Martinez SE, Andresen MC, Zhu Z, Papageorgiou I, Court MH. Pharmacogenomics of poor drug metabolism in Greyhounds: cytochrome P450 (CYP) 2B11 genetic variation, breed distribution, and functional characterization. Scientific Reports 2020;10:69. doi:10.1038/s41598-019-56660-z.
• O'Neill DG, Rooney NJ, Brock C, Church DB, Brodbelt DC, Pegram C. Greyhounds under general veterinary care in the UK during 2016: demography and common disorders. Canine Genetics and Epidemiology 2019;6:4. doi:10.1186/s40575-019-0072-5.
• O'Neill DG, Mitchell CE, Humphrey J, Church DB, Brodbelt DC, Pegram C. Epidemiology of periodontal disease in dogs in the UK primary-care veterinary setting. Journal of Small Animal Practice 2021;62(12):1051-1061. doi:10.1111/jsap.13405.
• Robinson EP, Sams RA, Muir WW. Barbiturate anesthesia in greyhound and mixed-breed dogs: comparative cardiopulmonary effects, anesthetic effects, and recovery rates. American Journal of Veterinary Research 1986;47(10):2105-2112. doi:10.2460/ajvr.1986.47.10.2105.
• Rooney NJ, Wonham KL, McIndoe KS, Casey RA, Blackwell EJ, Browne WJ. Weekly and daily tooth brushing by care staff reduces gingivitis and calculus in racing greyhounds. Animals 2021;11(7):1869. doi:10.3390/ani11071869.
• Shiel RE, Brennan SF, Omodo-Eluk AJ, Mooney CT. Thyroid hormone concentrations in young, healthy, pretraining greyhounds. Veterinary Record 2007;161(18):616-619. doi:10.1136/vr.161.18.616.
• US Food and Drug Administration, Center for Veterinary Medicine. Get the facts about pain relievers for pets. 2022.
• Zoran DL, Riedesel DH, Dyer DC. Pharmacokinetics of propofol in mixed-breed dogs and greyhounds. American Journal of Veterinary Research 1993;54(5):755-760. doi:10.2460/ajvr.1993.54.05.755.
• Zaldívar-López S, Marín LM, Iazbik MC, Westendorf-Stingle N, Hensley S, Couto CG. Clinical pathology of Greyhounds and other sighthounds. Veterinary Clinical Pathology 2011;40(4):414-425. doi:10.1111/j.1939-165X.2011.00360.x.