Episode 14: Vapes, Giardia, Raw Feeding, Teeth… and the Brachy Debate

Episode 14 of The Chatty Vets Podcast is one of those classic Two Week Takedown episodes where we start with “just a few quick topics” and somehow end up covering half of general practice.

This week, we chat through vaping exposure in dogs, Giardia, the canine microbiome, raw feeding, dentistry, retained roots, deciduous canines, and the bigger welfare questions around brachycephalic breeds.

A calm, focused, linear episode? Absolutely not. Useful? We hope so.

We begin with a few UK vet-world updates, including the sad news that Great Western Exotics is closing. For many vets, especially those working out-of-hours, Great Western has been one of those lifeline services you could call when faced with an exotic species and a rising sense of panic. Brendan shares a tortoise story. Charlotte shares a snake story. Neither of us sound especially exotic-confident.

We also touch on greyhound racing, with Wales and Scotland moving towards bans. It opens up a bigger question around welfare, sport, working animals and whether industries built around animal performance can ever fully separate the animal’s interests from human entertainment.

Then we move onto vaping.

There has been increasing discussion around e-cigarette exposure in dogs, especially when nicotine-containing products are chewed or ingested. Short-term signs can include vomiting, hypersalivation and tachycardia, although some dogs may be asymptomatic. The bigger unknown is the chronic household exposure question: if vaping indoors becomes normal, what does that mean for pets living in that environment every day?

From there, because apparently we cannot resist talking about guts, we get into Giardia.

The discussion focuses on how we diagnose and treat it in real life. Brendan talks about why he prefers a good three-day pooled faecal sample and microscopy before deciding whether Giardia is genuinely likely to be the cause of clinical signs, rather than simply detected on a highly sensitive PCR test. Charlotte raises the very practical question many of us wrestle with: are we still reaching for metronidazole too quickly?

Fenbendazole remains the first-line treatment many vets use, but recurrence is common, especially in young dogs, kennel environments and dogs with concurrent gut disease. We also talk about why avoiding unnecessary antibiotics matters, especially given what we know about metronidazole and the gut microbiome.

Which leads nicely into the microbiome.

A recent canine microbiome study has suggested we may know far less about the canine gut ecosystem than we thought. That has huge future implications for probiotics, prebiotics, diet, chronic enteropathy and perhaps even allergy and skin disease. For now, it is not something that instantly changes what we do in consults tomorrow morning, but it does suggest this area is going to become much more clinically relevant over the next few years.

And then, inevitably, we land on raw feeding.

This is where the conversation gets nuanced. We are not trying to turn every raw-feeding client into the enemy. In fact, one of the big themes is that if we set ourselves up in opposition to clients, we may lose the chance to actually influence them.

There are understandable reasons some owners are drawn to less processed diets. But there are also real concerns: nutritional imbalance, hygiene, young children in the home, immunocompromised people, bacterial contamination and antimicrobial resistance. The Food Standards Agency recently reported that 35% of tested UK raw dog and cat food samples contained harmful bacteria including Salmonella, Campylobacter and E. coli, and 29% failed to meet UK legal safety standards.

Our practical take? Be careful, be honest, and tailor the conversation to the household. A single adult with a separate freezer and excellent hygiene is not the same risk profile as a busy family home with toddlers crawling around and dogs licking faces.

The dentistry section is the big centrepiece of the episode.

We’re joined by Jonathan Frost from Frost Dentistry, who gives a brilliant GP-focused take on why dentistry is so stressful, why dental education at vet school has historically been so limited, and why “just a scale and polish” often turns into something much bigger once the patient is anaesthetised and radiographed.

Jonathan explains that teeth are like icebergs: what you can see above the gumline is only part of the story. Until the patient is asleep and dental radiographs are taken, you often do not know what you are dealing with.

We talk about retained roots, and I very bravely confess to not being able to resist atomising feline pre-molar roots with a burr. Jonathan is diplomatic, but clear: if a root can be seen on radiographs, ideally it should come out. If it cannot be retrieved, the owner should be told, follow-up imaging should be considered, and referral may be appropriate.

We also cover retained deciduous teeth. Jonathan explains why these roots will not simply resorb once the adult tooth has erupted alongside them, and why surgical extraction is often quicker and safer than trying to perform a neat closed extraction and ending up with a fractured root tip.

There is also a really useful section on when to refer dentistry cases. Jonathan’s advice is not that every tricky tooth needs referral, but that the decision depends on equipment, training, confidence, patient stability, owner expectations and whether the tooth could potentially be preserved rather than extracted. Fractured canines, for example, may be candidates for root canal therapy rather than extraction, particularly when they are major functional teeth.

Finally, we move into the brachycephalic debate.

Are we at the point where some breeds should be banned? Should breeding be restricted to dogs with better health scores? Or do we need to look much more broadly at inherited disease across all breeds, not just flat-faced dogs?

We talk about Frenchies, pugs and bulldogs, but also Cavaliers, Maine Coons, German Shepherds and other breeds where inherited disease is a major welfare concern. Brendan raises the idea that if we only keep narrowing gene pools through selective testing, we may not solve the deeper problem of genetic diversity. Could compulsory outbreeding ever be part of the solution? Controversial, yes. Worth discussing? Probably.

As ever, we do not pretend to have all the answers. But that is partly the point of the podcast: to have the conversations many of us are already having in practice, in prep rooms, over lunch, or while quietly panicking in the dental suite.

Previous episode: our Survival Guide to Starting in GP, aimed at students, new grads and anyone feeling anxious about those first steps into practice.

Next episode: we’re back on Sunday 10th May with a special RVN Awareness Month episode celebrating vet nurses.

Until then, please share the podcast with a friend, colleague, student, nurse, or anyone who enjoys honest GP vet chat with occasional dental confessions.