7 Reasons you stopped brushing your dog's teeth - and not one of them was laziness

It is about ten to seven in the morning. He yawns straight into your face, the way he does every morning, and for half a second you can see the back teeth. Then his mouth closes, the kettle goes on, the day starts, and you do not think about it again until tomorrow at ten to seven.

That half second is not nagging you because you are careless. It is nagging you because you know exactly what is supposed to be happening in that mouth, and you know exactly why it stopped happening.

The brush came first. Then the finger brush, because obviously the handle was the problem. Then the paste that was meant to taste of poultry. Then dental chews, because at least he would take those without a fight. A water additive, because it asked nothing of either of you. A spray, once, that you gave up on almost immediately.

None of that was laziness. Every one of those was somebody trying to solve the problem with the smallest amount of conflict on offer. And the chews he loved and the additive he ignored had one thing in common: neither of them puts anything against the gumline the way your own hand can, and neither of them ever showed you a thing. You do it, weeks pass, and you end up exactly as informed as you were before you started. That is not a habit. It is a standing order for hope.

There is a difference and it matters more than anything else on this page. Laziness is not wanting to do the job. Exhaustion is doing the job evening after evening, on the kitchen floor, with a dog's head under your arm and a brush he treats as an assault, and then working out that this cannot possibly be an event every evening for the rest of his life.

That was a rational call, not a failure. A routine that needs you to overpower your own dog is not a routine; it is a fortnight of willpower followed by a drawer. What gets the day's film off teeth is not brushing as such, it is doing something often - and you correctly worked out that this particular method was never going to give you often.

We will not tell you this reverses gum disease, because it does not. We will not tell you it takes off hardened tartar, because once it has gone hard that is a job for a vet with instruments, not a wipe with a person attached to it. We will not show you a dramatic before and after, because we do not know what happened to that mouth in between and neither do you. Neither a wipe nor a brush gets below the gumline or properly in between the teeth, and nothing you buy online does either. And you will not find a star rating on this page: we are new, and a number we cannot stand behind is worth less to you than nothing at all.

Read enough angry reviews in this aisle and they take the same shape. The anger is rarely about a product being mediocre at its job. It is about having been sold a miracle and handed, in the end, a wipe. So here is the job description in full: it wipes the day's plaque film and food debris off his teeth and along the gumline, with your finger, and you can see on the cloth afterwards whether anything came off. That is the entire promise. It is smaller than what this aisle usually promises you, and all of it is something we can stand behind.

CHOMP does not ask him to accept anything new. Dogs have strong opinions about implements. They have far fewer about you: the hand that has been in his ears, under his collar and prising something unspeakable out of his jaws in the park is already allowed near his face.

Nothing rigid goes in, and nothing has to be set up first. No sink, no water, no cornering, no second pair of hands, nothing to rinse out afterwards. The tub lives wherever the leads and the treats live, and it happens while the kettle boils, or in the half minute after the harness comes off and he is still pleased with himself from the walk. That is not a convenience feature bolted on at the end. It is the only reason it gets done at all. Something small that you actually do is the only version of this that survives an ordinary week, and that is a claim about habits rather than about teeth.

Each wipe has two sides doing two jobs. The ribbed side gets the day's gunk loose along the gumline, which a chew reaches only by accident. The smooth side takes it away instead of moving it about. Two wipes does a whole mouth, one per half of the jaw - that is how we use it ourselves, not a survey of anybody.

Then take it off your finger and look at it. Either something came off or it did not, and you know which within seconds, standing in your own kitchen. What the wipe proves is narrow and real: that was on the tooth, and now it is on the cloth. You are not being asked to believe a claim, wait, or trust a phrase on a label. After a cupboard full of things that never told you anything, being able to keep your own score is the difference between something you do again tomorrow and something that ends up in the drawer next to the brush.

Some dogs will not have it. Some will give you the front teeth and draw a firm line at the back ones. Some will let you do the lot on the first go and change their mind on Thursday. Pretending otherwise is how a pet brand ends up with somebody who feels cheated, and this aisle has enough of those already.

So the promise is written to be used rather than admired. Tell us inside sixty days that it is not working for you and we refund the product in full: 60-day happy-dog promise - opened tub included. Lid off, half the wipes gone, and in most cases nothing to post back to us. A promise that needs an unopened tub quietly needs you never to test the product, and we are not doing that.