Horse Care - Dental & Alternative Medicine

Dental care

A horse's teeth grow continuously throughout its life and can develop uneven wear patterns. Most common are sharp edges on the sides of the molars which may cause problems when eating or being ridden. For this reason a horse or pony needs to have its teeth checked by a veterinarian or qualified equine dentist at least once a year. If there are problems, any points, unevenness or rough areas can be ground down with a rasp until they are smooth. This process is known as "floating".

Basic floating can be accomplished by the practitioner pulling the end of horse's tongue out the side of the mouth, having an assistant hold the tongue while the teeth are rasped. The horse will not bite its own tongue, and will often tolerate the floating process if held closely and kept in a confined area where it cannot move. When complex dental work is required or if a horse strenuously objects to the procedure, sedation is used.

A horse can also suffer from an equine malocclusion where there is a misalignment between the upper and lower jaws. This can lead to a number of dental problems.

Horse teeth refers to the dentition of equine species, including horses and donkeys. Equines are both heterodontous and diphyodontous, which means that they have teeth in more than one shape (there are up to five shapes of tooth in a horse's mouth), and have two successive sets of teeth, the deciduous ("baby teeth") and permanent sets.

As grazing animals, good dentition is essential to survival, and continued grazing creates specific patterns of wear, which can be used along with patterns of eruption to estimate the age of the horse.

Alternative medicine in horses

Folk remedies and assorted "natural" treatments are sometimes used to care for horses. These treatments are controversial. Some remedies are supported by scientific studies that suggest that they are effective, others have no scientific basis and in fact may actually be harmful. The most common treatments are called nutraceuticals, assorted supplements that support the natural systems of the horse and which may have some scientific basis for efficacy, even if not fully supported or yet to be approved as either a drug or a feed supplement. The most popular of these are joint supplements such as glucosamine, chondroitin, and MSM.

Examples of folk remedies that are not effective include the feeding of chewing tobacco or diatomaceous earth to horses as a wormer. Neither of these has been proven to work in any empirical study. Other natural remedies, whether useful or not, may show up in drug testing, particularly any herbs derived from the Capsicum or valerian families.

Sometimes natural remedies are all that is available in certain remote areas. Examples include horses in certain tropical nations who have sprained tendons or ligaments are treated with rachette (Nopalea cochenillifera), castor bean leaves (Ricinus communis), aloes (Aloe vera) or leaves of wonder of the world (Kalanchoe pinnata). Natural remedies are also used to treat exercise induced pulmonary haemorrhage (EIPH) with lungwort (Pulmonaria officinalis). Other plants used in combination with conventional medications included liquorice (Glycyrrhiza glabra) root, aerial parts of mullein (Verbascum thapsus) or mallow (Althea), and comfrey (Symphytum officinalis) root.

Horse teeth often wear in specific patterns, based on the way the horse eats its food, and these patterns are often used to conjecture on the age of the horse after it has developed a full mouth. As with aging through observing tooth eruption, this can be imprecise, and may be affected by diet, natural abnormalities, and vices such as cribbing.

The importance of dentition in assessing the age of horses led to veterinary dentistry techniques being used as a method of fraud, with owners and traders altering the teeth of horses to mimic the tooth shapes and characteristics of horses younger than the actual age of the equine.