Hi it's Laura (with molly). Just to let you know we have just been to Mollyand she is like a totally different horse. She's dropped no hay overnight and enjoyed eating her full hay net. she's now out in the sunshine enjoying more hay. She seems much happie and calme too. Thank you so much.
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Whilst visiting a yard in the North of England I was aksed to check a horse that had been rescued named Dancer who had a couple of problems. He was having problems eating and could not keep food in his mouth, his previous owners thought he was aggresive with his food but this was not the case, it was because he was unable to eat due to the problems with his teeth, they then put him out in a field on his own with very little grazing, by the time he was rescued he was very under weight.
As with all horses I work with I checked Dancers incisors to see what condition they were in before attempting to fit the speculum. As you can see from the above picture they were not a pretty sight and he does have a slight parrot mouth. So before attempting any procedures on the back teeth I decided to do some correction work on the incisors and see how that helped with his eating. The almost V shaped pattern was removed by reducing the length of the teeth and this resulted in the incisors actually coming back into contact when Dancer dropped his head to feed.
This is a 13 year old horse that had never been seen by an equine dentist. He was in good condition but was difficult to handle when trying to fit the bit. The owner had recently bought him from a dealer and I was asked to look at the horse because he was headshy and was having trouble eating.
Before and after shots of the 2-6 premolar.
The first premolars in the bottom arcades were missing (3-6 & 4-6). This resulted in the hyper-eruption of the upper teeth as in the pictures (1-6 & 2-6). It took several hours to reduce these teeth before I could work on balancing the rest of the mouth.
A week later I returned to check on his progress and to complete the work on his back teeth. He was now eating much better and was not dropping any of his feed. His molars were in a much better condition than I expected but some work was needed, this was completed and an appointment was made for three weeks time to see how he is progressing.
This tooth (1-6) has a very large hook, you may be able to see from the photograph that I have already started to reduce the hook down. Hooks like this can interefere with the movement of the jaw. He also has what is known as a wavy mouth.
