(Continued from Pago S 9)
adapted to eating these foods, and as you might expect, their
teeth are a lot different than ours. In fact, their teeth have
some special features that are unique among the domesti
cated species. I have provided dental care for thousands of
horses and my experience has told me this: Any horse, if he
lives long enough, will outlive the usefulness of his teeth. Let
me explain why.
Hay and grasses are very abrasive food sources. Try
eating a few stalks of timothy hay and you’ll see what I
mean! Horses have highly specialized grinding teeth that
make quick work of chewing hay and grass. Still, the abra
sive nature of the food slowly wears down their teeth. In
fact, if horses had teeth like humans, this abrasive diet
would wear down their teeth in just a few year! Instead,
horses have what we call a hypsodont dentition. This is a
really nice feature that allows the horse to slowly push out
an extra tooth as the teeth wear down.
Think of each tooth in the horse’s mouth like it was the
lead in a mechanical pencil: The small piece of ‘working
lead’ is projecting out of the end of the pencil and attached
to it is a long reserve piece of lead that is slowly pushed out
over time to replace the lead that is worn off. The ‘working
lead’ is like the exposed tooth we see in the horses’ mouth.
The reverse crown of the tooth is just waiting to push out as
needed. As the lead in the pencil wears down, more lead is
pushed out to keep writing. What a great system! However,
there is one catch...
In the case of the mechanical pencil, we all know that if
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you use the pencil long enough, the day will come when you
ask the pencil for more lead and the last little nub of lead
falls out and the pencil no longer works. Well, as you might
have guessed, pretty much the same thing happens in the
horse’s mouth. When the horse is young, he starts out with
very long teeth that are stored in his head. There is a short
part of each tooth exposed in the mouth, with the reserve
part of the teeth hidden in the head. Slowly, about one
eighth of an inch a year, the tooth is pushed out to replace
the tooth lost to all that food he’s eaten. Pretty clever huh?
Until you get to the part where you run out of lead!
Let’s look at the math on this. The average sized horse
starts out with about three inches of reserve tooth as a
youngster. OK, if he uses one eighth inch a year, I figure he’s
got about twenty four years worth of tooth saved up. It just
so happens that, all things being equal, most horses’ teeth
start to fail at about this age. Of course this is a bit of a sim
plification, but it’s a reasonably accurate description of
what happens. As a horse approaches old age, he begins to
loose his ability to grind up that coarse diet. How could this
be? Well it seems that nobody ever figured that horses
would live this long!
Life out in the wild for horses is a lot more challenging
than life on the farm is today. In fact, the maximum life ex
pectancy of ‘wild’ horses is about fifteen years. This makes
sense. In their natural habitat, they would never have to
worry about outliving the function of their teeth. Inconsist-
(Turn to Page 61)
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