Chipped toof!

[silversheep]

This morning, while giving Marcel his antibiotics for a little skin infection he has, I noticed that it appears that one of his canines is chipped (probably about half of it is missing). Is it possible that this could be from biting the plastic syringe I use to administer the antibiotics? Also, now that it's done, is there anything else i can/should do about it?

 

[smhufflepuff]

Seems unlikely from a plastic syringe... both my hedgies have attempted to gnaw the ends of plenty of syringes. And Miss Satin has chomped on tweezers (eep!). But I suppose it is possible.

Is he, by chance, using a water bottle? They can chip teeth on those. If he his, I'd change him over to a water dish.

Either way, though, sorry your little one has a chipped tooth. My understanding is that, unless there are additional chipped teeth that would interfere with eating, he *should* be okay as is. I'd monitor his eating and activity and look for any changes.

 

[charlie]

Keep an eye on crunchie food intake. Hopefully he can continue as per normal but occasionally chipped and mssing teeth lead to a forced adjustment in diet (even if it means just softening the food).

 

[Melissa]

Aero had his toofers shipped too. I think it was either from roaming on the tile at play time or from the bowl. Many times he would get scared from either movement or noise and *smack* went his teeth. He never showed signs of pain and ate the crunchies just fine.

If you do notice his food intake decreasing, you can soften the food a bit wih some warm chicken broth or water. If he is showing signs of pain I would take him to a vet. Not sure what they can do besides extraction or pain management but Im sure they would be able to figure somehing out.

 

[Jeanette]

By canines, I assume you mean the two little fang like teeth you can see when they sniff in the air? Hedgehogs don't use these to crunch. They use them to grab hold of their prey, so I wouldn't worry too much about eating. It's mostly the molar like teeth (I think that one of the sets of teeth are actually named 'snail crunchers', lol).

I don't see how he could have chipped it on a plastic syringe. Spiny would get mad and almost violently chomp syringes and he never had a problem with teeth. Even as he got older and lost a few molars, he was eating perfectly fine.

 

[silversheep]

Thank you for the responses!

Marcel uses a ceramic dish, not a bottle (I really did take all the precautions I knew of to keep this from happening)

I had to switch his food after his vet visit, and he doesn't seem thrilled so far, so it's likely that that's the reason he isn't eating very much because he is not interested in the moist food either (long story short he has 88g to lose as well as his infection to contend with because of the food I was feeding him. But the vet said his teeth looked good, so it had to have happened between last Saturday and when I noticed it the other day)

Anyway, I guess it's a mystery, but I'll try moistening his new food to see if I can entice him. I've kind of been going by the "if he gets hungry enough he'll eat it" mentality, but is there a time limit I should put on that before I do something else?

BTW, the new food is Mazuri's Insectivore Diet as prescribed by the small/exotic animal vet.