Local anaesthesia for dental and oral surgery in cats and dogs

Background: Local and regional anaesthetic techniques are growing in popularity within many areas of veterinary surgery, and rightly so owing to their important modulation of intra‐ and postoperative pain, and with the subsequent improvements in general anaesthesia. Oral local anaesthesia is no exception, with several articles and book chapters devoted to it. However, many of these articles reference a series of historical techniques and injection sites, which on closer evaluation, may not actually achieve what was intended. Aim of the article: The aim of this article is to evaluate the tissues that are traumatised during oral and dental surgery, assess the afferent neural anatomy for these tissues and then discuss injection sites and techniques that are most likely to result in full anaesthesia of these tissues during surgery.