One thing we noticed soon after we got our first Maltese was that our puppy seemed to have a lot of tearing from his eyes.
We at first attributed the tearing to the fact that he was teething and we checked with our veterinarian and he told us that yes, some puppies have more tearing or eye drainage when they are teething.
However he also explained to us that Maltese are a breed that tends to have tear staining problems due to their bone structure and it is quite common and nothing to be alarmed about.
Well, that calmed our fears because it is important to us that our darling Maltese be healthy.
But now what do we do about the tear stain? We checked with other Maltese owners and we got lots of differing advice, unfortunately much of the advice did not work for our Maltese and the tear stain just got worse.
Some advice we were given was to always keep the hair around their eyes trimmed short.
We were also told to give our Maltese a higher quality type of food.
It was suggested that we try some topical tear stain removers that we applied to his face -- different powders and liquids solutions.
We were encouraged to add calcium tablets (Tums) to his food.
And we were also told give him special drinking water and to not use tap water.
What was the result? None of these ideas worked for our little boy.
It was pretty frustrating! We loved our darling Maltese, but his poor face was stained dark reddish brown from the inside corners of his eyes down the rest of his face.
He didn't look too happy either - maybe because his face was damp much of the time.
Finally, it was suggested that we try a special powder and all we had to do was add it to his food every day.
And guess what happened -- within four weeks our little Maltese's face was clean and white and dry and beautiful!