In this episode of the Animalweb podcast, Helen Stock speaks to veterinary surgeon and equine dentist Meisha Micklewright about the realities of equine dental care. Drawing on her dual qualification and hands-on experience, Meisha explains why dentistry is far more than a once-a-year routine.
They discuss how often horses really need dental checks, why many problems go unnoticed, and how issues such as sharp teeth, imbalances and hidden pathology can affect comfort and performance. The conversation also tackles the often-confusing question of who should carry out dental work, and what owners should look for when choosing a professional.
Packed with practical advice, this episode highlights the importance of regular, tailored dental care and gives owners the confidence to make informed decisions for their horse’s health.
Topics covered in this episode
- Why early checks in young horses and more frequent checks in older horses are important
- Meisha Micklewright’s career journey into equine dentistry
- The value of combining veterinary and dental qualifications
- How often horses really need dental checks, and why it varies
- Why a “one size fits all” approach doesn’t work for dental care
- Understanding how horses’ teeth grow and wear
- Common dental issues, including sharp edges, gaps (diastema) and “decay-like” problems
- Why many horses show no obvious signs of dental pain
- The impact of dental health on comfort, behaviour and ridden performance
- Links between dental balance, muscle tension and performance in competition horses
- When and how to schedule dental care around competition seasons
- The difference between vets and equine dental technicians, and why qualifications matter
Transcription
Here is a transcription of the podcast. (Please note this is an automated transcription, so we apologise for any errors from the original podcast.)
Hello everyone and welcome back to the Animal Web podcast. Today I am joined by Misha Micklewright ⁓ who is a veterinary surgeon and director at Beaver Equine Veterinary Dental Services. Misha is not only an experienced equine vet but she’s also a British Association of Equine Dental Technicians. So we’re really chuffed to be speaking to her today becaus
as a qualified equine dentist she’s in a unique perspective when it comes to horse health and dentistry. So welcome Mischa. Well thank you very much for having me and hello to everyone who’s joining us today. So let’s dive straight in and find out a little bit more about you if we can because I’m pleased to say that Mischa is joining us as an expert on Animal Web and is going to be providing
some really helpful articles and guides ⁓ to dentistry. So let’s start at the beginning. Can you please tell us a bit about your journey into the industry and how you end up specializing in equine dentistry? ⁓ It was a career path that I never could foresee happening. I went to vet school, always wanted to do equine and got a job in Cheltenham.
I working in a a Neckline hospital, I did want to be a surgeon. So my thought process was to do an internship there and then go to America for an internship. However, I met my partner along the way and decided not to go to America and instead ended up after my internship ⁓ in Devon at an ambulatory practice. It was a one man band. So I joined my boss, Richard Frost in Devon and
He did a lot of charity work. So we ⁓ had to do the dentistry for a couple hundred of horses in Devon. And he was really, really passionate about it and it was part of the job. So I had never asked a set of teeth before and he started me off and it went from there. So you’ve had…
quite a varied background really and I understand you also worked with race horses and obviously you’ve done general practice. How did those experiences shape where you are now do you think? So you’re correct that I took Gap Year out and I went and worked with race horses. I think this gave me a really good grounding in the equine industry. Hopefully my clients feel that I do have a lot of knowledge and I’m hopefully good at what I do as a
as I do as a vet, but I’m hopefully very relatable as a person, can talk to owners, trainers, grooms, whoever’s on the yard. And in a very simple way, I try not to over-complicate things too much because I think there’s so much science and big terminology out there. I try and say the terminology and then explain what that means. And I think my of my grounding in working within the industry really helped and also handling very fit.
competition horses. Nothing really scares me when I have a horse rearing in my face. I’m not really too worried. So we just take a very calm, gentle approach. I never get too flustered. I love working with needle shy horses. Really like kind of building that relationship with a vet. So, you know, I try to try and do that. And I think that’s really helped. The charity work has been so beneficial because clients don’t always have the same budget. So you know, kind of what’s gold standard, but what you can do.
And I do a lot on the road. I do have a clinic where horses can come in, but I think again, working within the industry makes you realise that not everybody has the same financial budget and you can work with that. So hopefully I tried to do that to be a good all round horse person so that when I qualified as a vet, I was more useful to clients. I’d imagine as well, correct me if wrong, but with the charity work, often you might not have a history of that horse. You don’t know.
sometimes even how old it is or where it’s been or what it’s done when you put it inside their mouth. Yeah, absolutely. And I’ve seen that a lot at the moment that I did a lot of charity work in Devon. And then when I set up this practice, again, I didn’t really foresee it happening, but I’ve ended up with working for a big equine charity in Lincoln where they have anywhere between kind of 200 to 300 horses on site, but then also a lot of horses out at homes.
and they are constantly kind of on missions to retrieve welfare cases. And therefore exactly that when they turn up, I have usually no history other than where they’ve been collected from and kind of have to age them, make decisions, not knowing if they’ve ever had a dental, they’ve had really good routine dental, not knowing their age or anything about them. exactly the charity work does set you up for kind of thinking on your feet.
they ever ask you to age the horses based on their age? that’s part of my job absolutely so any intakes I age so some do come with a passport and some kind of legacies from people that have sadly passed away and things like that but a lot of them if they are ⁓ kind of you know rehomes or rescue missions that yeah that is part of the job we have to age and there’s a very ⁓ it’s
Sometimes challenging, but sometimes very straightforward to age horses. It just depends kind of on their dentition. Young horses are much easier to age than older ones. So yeah, no, is part of the job that I have to regularly age them. Fantastic. So thinking about most of us with our horses now, ⁓ and I guess I always think of having to get the horse’s teeth done like once a year, but…
Would it be more than that or how often would regular checks for our horses be need to be done in your opinion? So I definitely think the more you know, the more you realise we don’t know. And I think that’s with dentistry, that there is still so much that we don’t know. And going back to kind of my career, I think when I first started doing dentistry as a new grad, your thought processes once a year is enough. And my first boss,
was second boss, but when I was in that first ambulatory job in Devon, he was so passionate about it and that’s what kind of really got me into it and I I then realized actually once a year is okay in some cases that’s absolutely fine, but in a lot of cases it might not be enough and what he really really instilled in me was every horse is an individual. It’s not a blanket policy. So I
that approach with my dentistry that I will go in and look at the horse’s mouth. But you have to treat every horse as an individual, so if that horse has a really good mouth, especially like some cobs have really nice balanced mouths, they don’t get that sharp if they’re in their kind of early teens and therefore once a year might be okay. But a lot of times there’s a lot more going on in there than you think, there’s imbalances or they’re erupting quickly, so it really depends on the horse. My rule of thumb, if you really have to pin me down and say
you have to do a blanket policy for all horses. I would advise usually six months up until I do my first dental check around ⁓ two years old because I think it’s good for them to see me as a vet and put the gag on. I don’t always sedate them. I might just put the gag on and get them to know and just have a little look and say, yes, you’ve got wolf teeth. Let’s get these out if you want to, which we can talk about later. ⁓ Or no wolf teeth you can crack on and break the horse at three or four.
back it or so you should just do the first dental check at two years old because I think that’s a really nice starting point. Again if you have a horse out in the field and it’s not handled and you don’t get it checked until three it’s not the end of the world. I try and be very realistic with expectations. Our life isn’t set by gold standards so we have to work for what we’ve got. So then I usually see them every six months until about seven or eight and I find that’s because
they’re erupting quite quickly. Again, things have changed that I used to say, until six years old, but now I actually do it if the owner is willing until seven or eight every six months because they’re erupting so quickly. I’d rather do little and often every six months than once a year and take off quite a lot. and then if they’ve got a really nice balance now, when they kind of go 10 into their early teens, I might go for once a year. And then once they get to about 15, so kind of mid to late teens,
things can start to change, they get other pathologies which I’m sure we’ll come on to in a bit and therefore those horses might go back to six-monthly. And again, it’s more, I try and explain it like visiting like hygienists then, it’s not always to do with the rasping, it might be due to gum disease or ⁓ missing teeth or ⁓ holes within the teeth and things like that which we can talk about in minute. So it’s not always that they’re seen every six months just to rasp, it could be for pathology.
Yeah, so it’s almost like children in a way, isn’t it? So as soon as their teeth sort of start to come through and you know, moving around, we’re into the dentist, but to get them used to going to the dentist and the experience and what’s involved and what’s expected of them, then, you know, regularly until the teeth kind of settle down a little bit and then as you get older, as some of us are, you find that you’re going a lot more often to
keep what you’ve got going. Exactly, exactly, exactly. So what’s your day to day like? Are you seeing all sorts of things on a day to day or how does your life of me should look as a headwind dentist? So I won’t bore with my life too much, but building on from what we’ve discussed earlier, how I got into dentistry and kind of stemmed from a really passionate boss, kind of teaching me the ways in the charity.
I then relocated with my partner from Devon to Leicestershire about six years ago now. And I worked for ⁓ a lovely boss up here, who again was, was just three of us, it was quite small practice, and he didn’t do any dentistry and I had done quite a lot. And I said, we’re missing a trick. ⁓
As a business friend, but also for my poor horse owners, I was going to sedate for the dentist if the horse was a little bit naughty or worried or they had lots of problems. And so they were paying a vet for a call out, a vet for our time to sit there whilst the dentist was asking and also for the sedation. And it was coming out over 200 pounds per visit. And I just said, my poor owners don’t have, you know, some don’t have a lot of money. And I just think routine, the basis of all of this.
Routine dental care should be affordable to everyone. It’s not a luxury, it is a necessity and it should therefore be affordable to everyone. So can I buy some dental equipment? And he was really supportive and said, absolutely. And then I realized the next barrier was a bit different up here too in Devon that there’s definitely more horses and probably more competition horses and a lot of people saying, well, you’re just a vet, vets can’t rust teeth.
And I felt like that is what I personally was coming up against quite a lot. And so I said to my boss, I want to do my dental exams because I want to be as qualified and also have respect for my dentist. They go through so much training. I want to be on the same level playing field as them so that they feel confident talking to a vet. And I understand the training they’ve had to go through and the hoops they’ve jumped through to get where they are. So he was really supportive and ⁓ there’s two ⁓
associations in the UK that you can qualify with worldwide and the BADT. And ⁓ I went with the BADT just because it runs with Beaver, which is the veterinary association in the UK. So it tied in quite nicely. So I went with BADT. And it’s usually you do have to have done three years of training. So luckily I’ve done that being a vet and you do 300 case studies. So I went and sat my BADT exams and
I then did a lot of dentistry and after a while decided actually that’s all I wanted to do. So I decided to give up my job, which was very sad because I did love it, but all I wanted to do was dentistry. I then set up my own business and that leads me on to my day to day. So I purely now, 90 % just do dentistry all day, every day. So a bit like after our webinar today, I’ve got 10 dentals and an incisor extraction and a canine extraction to do today.
I do still do every Tuesday night on call and every fourth weekend on call as a vet. So I still keep my hand in and do emergencies. And if like something comes in during the day, like a couple of days ago, I had a wound come in and I was right next door. So I went, but we have other vets in the vet practice to do vet stuff and I do solely dentistry really. And so I kind of start out in the morning. I drive to my first call, which is usually half an hour to an hour and I’ll set up all my kit and I’ve asked my first set of teeth.
and then I just work my way through the day. I do mostly routine dentistry. basis of kind of my thought process is that routine dentistry is absolutely essential. So I like doing the advanced stuff, but I really like just rasping teeth and providing good routine dental care. So do about, my maximum is about 10 a day because I feel like then your body gets worn out or you might get bored or you just get fatigued. So I try and do 10 a day because personally I prefer quality over quantity.
So yeah, all day I just rasp teeth and then I come home. How long does it, just out of curiosity, how long does it take you, I know it’s probably different for every horse, but on average for a routine rasping, how long does it take? Because at 10C it still seems a lot. Yeah, it does. So it is, we actually have kind of protocols in the vet practice, so that my lovely reception team know how long to book off for other vets for dentals. So we allow,
15 minutes for unpacking, setting up, greeting the owner. A lot of them is routine work. So if I had a new owner that I’ve never met, we might allow half an hour because you want to get a thorough history, build a rapport with them. So mainly like we just don’t like rushing anything. So then I usually say it takes about 45 minutes for a routine dental. 20 of that, 30 of that is the rasping, but you have a thorough head check first, a mirror exam, a visual exam.
checking the horse as a whole rather than just kind of whacking a gag on and looking in. We try and do a thorough kind of involve all the animal and if there’s anything else we need to consider. And then we allow 15 minutes to half an hour for cleaning. We disinfect everything between yards and so we allow 15 minutes to half an hour for that. So we allow an hour to an hour and a half for each dental.
And then obviously there’s a bit of driving time in between if you’re going to the next job. But the girls are really good at planning my day. So they try and keep driving to a minimum. It’s a long day. Not fit and strong to do as well that many. Wow, impressed. I think your clients must be very lucky to know that the dentist is also a qualified vet. I would imagine, can’t help but notice other things and…
other things going on sometimes where you know to have a vet checking your teeth and potentially go is that back all right is that leg all right and things which ⁓ you know I bet as a vet you can’t help noticing sometimes. Yeah absolutely so we we because we are a veterinary and dental services we have a lot of our clients are our vet clients as well so we know like their vaccine status so don’t always ask that because I know I saw Billy last month for a vaccine.
But a lot of them also have a lot of dental clients that aren’t our clients. So with that, with our CVS code of conduct, the way it works in the UK is we are really strict, but it means I have a great rapport with other vets. So sometimes if I’m on a yard doing teeth and they say, would you mind looking at this? I’m like, absolutely, but you’re kind of registered with another vet. So I’ll have a look. And then I usually just give that ring, that better ring and say, I was on the yard doing teeth. I’ve looked at this and I’ve said they should give you a ring or.
it’s actually not that bad, but just wanted to let you know. And so I try and have a really good rapport and not step on anyone’s toes, but when you’re on the yard, exactly. And if there are any clients, very often I would do, if they’re our own veterinary registered clients, would do exactly like, might do a lameness and also look at teeth or do a vaccine at the same time so that they save money on visit fees and things like that. No, I think your clients must be very lucky. I would love that. ⁓ So,
Thinking about why dental care is so important, where does it fit alongside things like vaccinations, worming and pharery and things like that? How do you think owners should be timetabling it, guess, scheduling it within their life?
So think it really doesn’t matter. Dental can be done all year round. So like worming, when we say do wormer counts spring, summer and autumn. Dental is more like a barrier that you can have your teeth done at any time. So I don’t, there’s not really a pro or a pun. If you have something like a race horse or a trail hunting horse that their main work season is in the winter.
If they do only get seen once a year, I kind of like to do them say in September so that you know then that horse is comfortable all through winter. And then if race horses go out in the spring, March, April, May, you know, they’ve got four months off in the field. They might be getting a little bit shocked, but they’ll be fine. The same with the venters. If their venting season is autumn and spring, I sometimes do a six monthly denture. do one in the summer and one in the middle of winter so that
withdraws the sedation that they’re never off or risk withdrawals with their competitions, but at all times their teeth are spot on for their competing season because if you did it just before their spring season, they’ll be getting sharp by the autumn. So, yeah, there’s not really a set rhyme or reason. No, no, but that makes sense. You mentioned earlier that horses have a unique dental system.
Can you talk us through that in a simple way so that I can understand? Yeah, absolutely. And ⁓ I think that’s it, that it’s finding a way that everyone understands. So today we can start really simply and then guess in future we can expand as people’s knowledge grow. And knowledge is power, isn’t it? So the more you know, the more you understand and can then work with your horse and with your paraprofessionals.
So I think as well a lot of our members are very very good the more they know actually the more questions they ask and I think that’s the way to be it’s you often find that the smartest person in the room is actually the person asking the most questions. Correct absolutely exactly I love that yeah absolutely so I am they have teeth that they’re hypsodont which basically means that their teeth are continuously erupting
So sometimes we explain it as growing, which isn’t strictly true because they kind of have a set amount of teeth. That teeth doesn’t grow any longer. It just erupts within the skull into the occlusal surface, like into the mouth, into the oral cavity. So the occlusal surface is your grinding surface. So that’s constantly being kind of ground down by the opposing teeth. And that’s when they kind of rub against each other to chew the food and break the food down like hay.
so they are continuously erupting and that’s why they get sharp because they are always growing down if they’re the top teeth or up if they’re the lower teeth. They have six cheek teeth so three premolars and three molars. They can have four teeth. They can also have canines so males usually have four canines. Females usually don’t have canines or they’re blind under the gum but some females can have canines.
just depends on the horse. And then they have six incisors on the maxillary arcade, the top arcade, and six mandibular incisors. So they have quite an extensive dental system. So the incisors pick up the food and grasp the food, and then they take the food to the back, and that’s where the grinding happens. So a common question is, ⁓ you know, if an incisor needs taking out of
or it falls out or in some cases, which we’ll go on to, we take out a lot of the incisors, the horses can still do really well because it’s the cheek teeth that do the grinding. So I’d be much more worried about losing it one or two, three or four cheek teeth than I will with incisors. But it’s because of this anatomy that keeps erupting, which is why they get sharp. And that happens quicker in younger horses, which is why we need to rast them more often. So,
then within the cheek teeth and incisors to an extent there’s different structures such as nerves and vascular channels and lots of different structures which I’m sure we’ll go on to talk about and things can go wrong within those structures as well so it’s kind of you get the the common things that go wrong such as fractures of teeth like we do but then more complicated things can happen within within the mouth. So is that the most sort of
common problem when you’re doing even just your routine work is that the most sort of common thing you see is fractures and issues like that or are there other common issues? Yeah there’s definitely other common issues you can get things in and it depends on the age so like in older horses you definitely see diastomata and infundibular caries quite often. to need to explain that one. Yeah so we can definitely talk about that so diastomata is just a gap between the teeth
So this is again, because of this eruption of the teeth, the teeth at the apex, so kind of the root is narrower than the occlusal surface, which is the grinding surface, which hopefully in one of my, as we go forward, I might draw a little diagram so people can see, but as the teeth are erupting, they actually become narrower, so food gets stuck in between them. So that’s called a diastomata. And then infantibular caries, have like holes
holes within the middle of the tooth, they’re like blind-ended sacks that should be filled with cementum and if for some reason that cementum isn’t formed properly they can get like a little defect on the surface, food packs in and it’s like a whole cycle of… it’s not decay because of the reasons but we call it decay. Scientifically that’s not completely correct but it’s easy for horse-unters to…
owners to understand if we say decay. So the tooth decays in these holes and that’s what can cause it can then go into a nerve or it could fracture the tooth. So it just depends on age that fractures are in general, not uncommon, but depending on the age, there are things that I would say are also very common depending on the age. I would imagine, you know, talking like about calling things decay when it actually isn’t, sometimes relating it to what we’re used to hearing at the dentist. So
you need floss more for example horses can’t floss or you’ve got a cavity you need a filling correct it’s the we all understand we all go ⁓ okay yeah yeah exactly and that’s what i tried to be i would say like you know for the vets or dentists hear me talking sometimes you do think that’s not quite correct but you’re exactly right that as long as my clients understand we can go into more fancy terminology later down the line but it
But if people don’t understand then they can’t action that or process that so it is using terminology that also horse owners do understand to start with Understood. Yeah. No, that’s great. and the You mentioned a few times about when the teeth get sharp What kind of problems can that cause why is that so I mean it sounds but it sounds painful But what’s actually going on there when they get sharp? So
The horse’s head, if you think about it, the top of the head is wider than the underneath of the head. So the bottom jaw, which we call the mandible, is narrower than the maxillary arcades, kind of just below the eye. So the top teeth sit outside the bottom teeth. So it’s usually the outside of the top teeth that get sharp. So we call that the buccal aspect of the maxillary arcade. And then the inside of the lower teeth that get sharp, and we call that…
the lingual, because of tongue, lingual aspect of the mandibular teeth. So it’s outside of the tops and inside of the bottoms. And that’s because of the anatomy of the head, because the top jaw is wider. So that then can cause, like when they’re eating, those sharp edges can rub against, and the classic, which most hawk-horses listening to this will have heard, is ulcers. It can cause ulcers of the mucosa of the cheeks.
So it’s especially kind of exacerbated when you then might put, everyone gets worried about putting bits in horses’ mouths, but with me personally, I’m more worried about kind of how tight the cheek teeth are or how tight the noseband is because the bit really does sit in front of the teeth, whereas the noseband, if you’ve got sharp edges and cranked your noseband up, you are trapping the cheeks or buccal mucosa against those sharp edges. So it can cause ulcers and…
and nasty kind of blistering inside the mouth really. Well you’re talking to the right people, we do a lot about nose band tightness. And the problems it can cause. ⁓ yes that’s just another reason why exactly. what signs might owners see if there’s an issue? What should owners be looking out for?
That’s such a good question and it always shocks people that ⁓ hopefully again we’re going to do a little article on it and I want to show everyone all these problems that horses can get and ⁓ off the top of my head I’ve got about 12 pictures of different problems and only one or two of those horses actually showed clinical signs so my answer is very often there is no clinical signs but your horse needs the dental. So I
would say that if your horse is actively showing clinical signs such as quitting, spitting food out or chewing on one side, something like that, then usually it’s actually quite bad. But horses are so stoic, I see horses with fractures, displaced teeth into gums causing massive ulcers ⁓ in the gum, food stuck, twigs stuck, and at no point do they show any signs of…
It’s one of my first questions I ask like, is there any quitting, which is spitting out balls of food? Is there any problems chewing? Is there any ridden issues, et cetera, et cetera? Most of the time people say, no, the horse is fine. There’s some times you get the other way where they say, oh yeah, there’s definitely a ridden issue and you go in and say, oh, the mouse lovely. So it might be a ridden issue or something else. But a lot of the time, if I go in and see a problem, the history would have been that there is no problems with my horse. So they are just so stoic, which is why routine dental care.
and why I’ve probably gone, if the owner can afford it and thinks it’s reasonable, I try and do the dentals every six to nine months rather than a year in some horses, because a year is a long time not to check the teeth. And if I go in and go, oh, they’re all fine, just a little tidy up, no problem, that’s great. But if I go in and see a problem, we don’t know if that happened nine months ago or six months ago. So a lot of the times they just show no signs.
No, you’re right, they’re very stoic, a lot of horses, aren’t they? So there’s sometimes, I think, some confusion around dentistry and who should be doing it and who you should employ to do it. Because, got to be honest, we’re not all lucky and live in your area and can employ you. Sometimes you might have to ring a couple of dentists before you can even find one that’s free.
I know also know quite a few vets that aren’t keen on using people that are just dentists. Could you, I know it’s a bit of a hot topic and I don’t mean to put you in the hot seat because you’re kind of sat in both camps. But what could you help explain that a little bit of why there is this awkwardness around who’s looking at your teeth? Yeah, it’s always the question I absolutely dread because
I am sat wearing both hats here and I feel extremely privileged to be able to wear both hats and there’s not a lot of us. I think at the point where I qualified as a dentist there was only eight vets and dentists in the UK that were qualified as both, you know, eight or nine. It wasn’t very many at all. Now, since then, a lot more vets have qualified under the BADT but it’s still not a huge proportion and I also must stress that I don’t think
vets need to be dental qualified that you know you do have people that are just really keen on doing good routine dental care and anything more advanced they pass that on to a senior colleague but I think and it’s really hard because everybody has different opinions if you speak to dentists you should be fully qualified as a dentist and if you speak to vets then you know everyone’s different but I think the main thing is as long as they’re qualified so whether that’s with the
worldwide association, the BADT or as a vet. And the main thing I think personally, I think is that they should have a keen interest in dentistry. So a vet might have spent all their CPD doing extra courses. So as a vet, there’s lots of extra courses ran on dentistry. So there’s two days in Newmarket, you can do a course in Dorset, one in Scotland. So they might spend all their free time doing CPD on teeth.
just because they’re not qualified as a dentist doesn’t mean they’re not really, really good at it. They just haven’t sat those exams. But I guess personally the way we run my business is that we are trying to encourage all the girls who’ve got two other vets working for me and I am trying to qualify them because I just think more as a respect thing as well that you know them what the dentists have been through. You’re in a level par with them. You can talk to them and you’re one of them.
not saying that’s always the case. So I think as a horse owner, if you are looking for someone to do your teeth, you just want someone with that is qualified. So whether that’s with one of the two associations or as a vet, you want someone that’s fully qualified. But also if they are a vet, just that they have a keen interest in dentistry and that they do a lot of it. Because as a new grad, when I put that gag on, I hadn’t had one day’s training and I was just expected. did, I
Luckily, I then got trained by my boss, but I was just, if I was in another job, I would have just been expected to go out and blindly rasp having one hour lecture at university, which is why them vets do get a bad rep. So I think as long as that person has taken it upon themselves to do good development and have a keen interest, then they should be doing an adequate job. But as a horse owner, think using someone that’s fully qualified or if it’s a vet having a
someone with a keen interest is really important and it’s very difficult. The main thing we struggle with is that there are lots of unqualified dentists so there’s lots of courses that you can do in America for like 10 days or three weeks. I suppose the reason why equine dentists that qualify in the UK get a bit twitchy so for example for the BADT I’m going to talk about the BADT because that’s who I’m qualified with and that’s what I know their system inside out rather than
I know a bit about worldwide, but I don’t know the exact examination process because I haven’t sat it, although I know lots of good dentists I work with that have. So with the BADT, we have to train for three years, as I said at the start of this video. So all my girls that have started, they are doing their three years of training under me. And we have to submit 300 case reports when you go to sit your first set of exams in September. Then you have to a theory examination.
in the new year and then you have to go on quite a few training weekends. So you’ve trained for three years under your mentor but you then have to do extra training with other people and then you can finally sit your practical examination and the pass rate is very low. I can’t quote, I’ve forgotten, I’ll be wrong to and I’d misquote but it is very low. Sometimes it’s not even half of people that sit it but that just goes to show how strict they are.
how much they want this to be kind of regulated and people that are really good because once they pass the exam they can go out on their own. So you want to make sure that person is absolutely going to do a good job. the part is a really tough call to be a dentist, which why I think all the my girls I encourage to sit it because I think they should know how difficult it is. as a horse owner, if someone’s kind of done three weeks in America.
compared to three years of training, it’s just quite hard. It’s a numbers game. You have to do lots to be really good at it. And I’m still, you know, after all these years, still progressing and still learning new things and still seeing new cases. You never stop learning. And therefore, I would just be careful with qualifications that aren’t recognised. also sounds like a mission in dedication.
to have done three years, to do 300 case studies, that’s gonna take time in itself, no? You’re dedicating yourself to that. it sounds like an achievement just to have got, I don’t mean to trivialise it, but it’s an achievement to have just got through all of that. You’re dedicated, which I think a lot of vets are.
anyway but to do that in a specialist area and even just thinking about vets a lot of vets dedicate themselves to different parts of the horse you know internal and lameness and whatever it might be so and that’s it and a lot of vets actually dislike dentistry so my partner for example and he kind of goes what’s teeth is a bit of a bit of a running joke but a lot of vets really actually don’t like dentistry which i think why
was probably stigma around it 10, 15 years ago, which hopefully we’re improving now because a lot of vets nowadays do love dentistry and want to do a good job. So I think it’s just getting rid of that stigma around it. And also, as you said, it is a lot of dedication. And if you’re trying to be a good all-round vet, you might not have the time, finances or that to be able to go do the exams. But it doesn’t mean that you’ve not gone on
lots of CPD over multiple years to do a really good job at a routine rasp. So I don’t think people should rule out vets doing teeth at all, but just, you know, choosing someone that really is passionate about it. And we will probably at some point go through what it involves doing a neural exam. And I think owners listening to this can really watch their dentist and just take kind of relief
that your dentist is doing a good job if they do these simple things that all dentists should be doing, whether you’re a vet or you know kind of just not just going in and rasping blindly doing thorough checks. So horse owners hopefully can educate themselves from our webinar and learn what you can look out for and if you’re having a new dentist or you’ve never owned a horse before and you’re starting to do get a dentist looking out for these things as well as their qualifications can make sure that you know your horse is in safe hands.
I love it when the dentist is here because I ask all the questions and I say, can I have a look? ⁓ he’s very good at using, because he’s obviously had his hand in there and he normally goes, it’s about this long. And he shows, you know, from the forefinger to the knuckle when he, and it’s fantastic to understand what’s going on. ⁓ I’ve never had a dentist not want to talk to me whilst they’re doing it because they’re always
that ones that I’ve experienced very passionate about it and I love that you show an interest of what’s going on. What’s that one? What’s that tool for? What are you doing there? Absolutely. I love getting, you know, getting a horse to feel inside a horse’s mouth or have a look in over my shoulder. Just, but I always, yesterday had three times, I didn’t know that tongues are so big and it’s really, you know, I didn’t know the teeth go so far back. So
That’s it. The as we said earlier, knowledge is power and learning all about your horse is really important. I’ve done that thing as well where I’ve looked in the gun. Oh my god, that looks awful. And that’s absolutely fine. Oh, okay. Because it’s alien. sounds a bit daunting. Yeah, yeah. Fantastic. So, um, just thinking, because we have a lot of people that listen and that have compete at a good level and are worried about performance. And their horses
performance and I know we touched on it briefly when we talked about ⁓ good scheduling of your dentistry before ⁓ competition season and things like that but how much do you think bad or ⁓ unchecked dentistry can affect performance? you seen anything like that where competition horses have been carrying a problem and it’s affected them? I’ve actually got a really good story and I wouldn’t have believed it if you told me
couple of years ago. So I think that dentistry, bad dentistry or more to point neglected dentistry, so not having a horse’s teeth done, can negatively impact the horse. I think if you’re having a good dental technician or vet rasping and they’re doing a really good job and the horse is still showing signs of behaviour, they might have a quirk or I think there is something and I definitely get good feedback saying you know ⁓
horse is much better and things like that. I think a lot of things owners are concerned about actually isn’t to do with teeth. So when I go inside the mouth I go, it’s lovely, there’s no problems, it’s balanced, there is no problems. ⁓ And so we need to look elsewhere, we need to look with training or another veterinary issue. So think a lot of the time owners do get really hung up that it might be teeth because, and there’s a really good reason for that, you can’t see inside the mouth.
So it’s absolutely like as an owner myself, when I do my horses, I don’t know how bad they’re gonna be until I open up the mouth and see. but I think a lot of things aren’t to do with teeth. But if they are really sharp or really unbalanced or have a problem, then it can cause performance issues. And I guess my stance on this has now changed slightly. I’ve been working with a couple of local physiotherapists and chiropractors. And when…
doing a dental check is more than just rasping, as we’ve talked about, there’s lots of things that can go wrong. But also, horse’s teeth can become really imbalanced. So you can have ridges, or you could have one side that’s kind of longer clinical crown than the other side, or a bit where the kind of jaw gets locked as such. So because of the ridges kind of sitting within each other, they can’t, we call it lateral excursion, but they can’t move their jaw side to side very well.
And I had a couple of different physiotherapists come to me and say, I treated that horse six weeks ago, and then you’ve rassed the teeth. And I’ve treated it again since, say, a couple of eventers. And I’ve treated the horse since. And at the first, I just thought it was a bit of a fluke. But my local physiotherapists definitely think they see an improvement. And we’re talking about these, we’re not, we’re probably talking more about the competition horses here.
where you are looking for that extra one or two percent in a dressage test, that extra little feel at the end of the bridle. And that’s why those cases I would recommend every six months. If you’re a pleasure horse and happy hacking, you’re not really looking for that. But in these competition horses, when you’re competing to that higher level, the physiotherapist feedback have been the horses kind of it might be the TMJ or it might be another.
like a masseter muscle or something, definitely has less tension since rafting and I talk a lot about when I’m doing dentistry about an occlusal balance. So it’s not just rafting off the sharp points, it’s addressing their grinding surface to make sure it’s all really balanced. Your dentist will be doing this, we all get taught to do it. But I don’t think as owners we get told about it that much. So we just say, we knock off some sharp points and so it’s just education again. And so I do a lot of this occlusal balancing and I’ve talked to ⁓
lot of physiotherapists about it. so I had the story is that and I absolutely wouldn’t have believed it, but this is the first story I have the horse it happened with that have a very nice horse competing at four star. It’s treated every six weeks by physiotherapists and the owner is a vet. And he absolutely won’t mind me sharing this story, but there’s no names anyway. And he’s a good vet. He’s he’s actually a specialist in his area, which isn’t teeth. And he’s been doing the horse’s teeth.
and the daughter rides it to compete with And the horse likes to run out occasionally, just very occasionally. And they couldn’t get on top of it. And it also isn’t very good on the right bend. And he’s been doing the teeth ragers. And I looked in and I said, the physiotherapist recommended that I go and see it. And they were all, I work with the vet quite often. So he said, yeah, come and have a look. I said, it’s lovely in here. I can’t add anything to this.
It’s very minimal what I would change compared to what you’ve done. Very, very minimal. A few tweaks here and there, millimeter here, millimeter there, a little bit of rebalancing here, a little bit more of that sharp edge. Very little. And he said, go on then, off you go. So I did it. And I did the rasp how I would do it. And I mean, it was minimal, changes. And the horse hasn’t ran out since. And then it hadn’t ran out since. And then at six months on the dot, it started running out.
and the physio said the tension is coming back. And I went in and said, it’s not sharp. There’s nothing I can do as a dentist. It’s really not sharp. It’s lovely in here. There’s a little bit of imbalance that’s come back again, a millimeter here, millimeter there. So I rebalanced it and the horse stopped running out again. So now we do it five and a half months and they are absolutely convinced. I’m like, it’s not me, someone else that’s doing it, but they’re absolutely convinced it is the pattern. Every time it’s due for a six month dental, it does have a little run out.
and the right vein gets quite tight and the dressage marks just drop one or two. So that was the first and we’ve seen a couple of cases since when I’ve been working with those one or two physios that were involved with other cases since and we have been seeing it. So if you asked me that question a couple years ago, I would say no, there’s not that much, it’s rideability, we can prevent sharp edges and can prevent really hopefully work with bad pathology, but those little improvements, no.
However, we’re all open to change and we’re always learning, as I’ve said, and I have definitely learned from my paraprofessionals and I think my opinion has changed that maybe with those top courses that are really, you’re really expecting those one or two marks and that suppleness and they might just be a bit blocked on one side, if you work with your other paraprofessionals, farrier, physio, things like that, maybe we really are making an improvement in performance.
Well, I think that as well, those people at that level would be looking and ensuring any marginal gain. And if that if their marginal gain is you coming at five and a half months, there’s something ticked off. And I feel I genuinely feel talking to a lot of professionals, they’re ticking things off to make sure that everything can think of and if it is that getting you there to do nothing, it’s fine. It’s there. Whatever.
Maybe the horse just really likes to see you every five and a half months and if that’s what it takes then that’s good. And I guess that’s it that the story was is that it wasn’t a bad job. The vet was doing a nice job. It wasn’t that it was ever a bad job. It was just slightly different what I offered to the table. No, that’s good. So just thinking of sort of rounding up a little bit and all the things that you’ve said and I will say again,
that you are very kindly going to be helping us with some looking at some different case studies and issues and problems and maybe some guides ⁓ for people on animal webs so that they can understand a bit more, well, a lot more about dentistry because it sometimes is a bit of a literally hidden art in that we never see inside a horse’s mouth. What kind of practical sort of takeaways, anybody listening now, would you want them to have? ⁓
to walk away with any bits of advice or thoughts in the back of their brains as I know they’re all currently searching through their phones for their… When was the last time we had the dentist and making a call? Absolutely. As you have said that you can’t see inside the horse’s mouth and we’ve talked about that and it is very hidden and therefore if we had like a wound on the leg or something like that we would be addressing it more often and I think a big take-home note is that if your dentist
or vet or dental technician, sorry, or vet, spot something, then, and they need to see the horse, they feel they need to see the horse in X amount, then you have to trust them because you can’t see inside that mouth. And if they need to stop that gum disease from happening because they need to see the horse once a month for three months, if it’s got gum disease or something like that, then you need to trust them. So breaking that down, number one rule is have a good relationship with your.
dental technician or vet. I think that’s so important. You see your farrier every six weeks and I’m sure everyone listening to this has a really good relationship with their farrier and you trust them. And if you don’t, you might find someone that you do work with. But I think just because you only see your dental technician twice a year, you still need to have lots of trust in them. Because if something does go wrong, like horses teeth do fracture and they do get pathology and they do get problems, you need to be able to trust them that they’re making the right decision for you and your horse.
So I definitely think my three kind of bits of advice would be find someone that you have a good connection and trust with, absolutely. The second would be make sure they are appropriately qualified with the qualifications we’ve discussed during this webinar. And the third would be to try and be as compliant as you can with your equine dental technician or vet.
that if they say I really do need to see the horse in six months, it’s for a reason and try and work with them for the best possible results. And if you don’t understand something, just ask. As you said, we love to explain things. so, I talk to my owners all the time that I wake up in the morning and I love my job. I am absolutely obsessed with teeth, as my partner would say. I love it so much and I’m so passionate about it.
And it’s mainly about routine care, just going out and rasping that little Shetland pony and making sure he’s comfortable or that Shire horse. It’s not always the fancy dancy complicated or complex work. So I think just ask questions and build that rapport with your professional. If I may add in as well, because the thing that you’ve really made me think about is age, that it can change, that your horse may have been having it a year, but if they suddenly said, look, they’re getting older or…
they’re young and they’re growing, it’s going to change and it might suddenly be, actually I want to come back in four months, just that’s worrying me and I want to check it. They’re looking in there and the horses do change and grow or age like we all do. absolutely. And I think that’s it that with the farrier, we are all used to paying our farrier bills every four to six weeks or eight weeks, depending on what cycle you’re on.
Sometimes then your dentist can almost seem like an additional cost, but you think we look after their feet every two months. We don’t need to see them that often, a lot of the time for teeth, but I always try when we’re thinking about costs and we’re saying, we need to them twice a year. Actually, if you compare that to the farrier, it’s really not a high cost of owning a horse. yeah. Fantastic. Well,
Thank you so much. That’s been really insightful. I’ve really enjoyed our conversation today and I am looking for, well, I know you’ve already given me a bit of an article to get us going. So we need to work on that, but I know we’re to be getting some more from you, which I’m really looking forward to. And if you have that many exciting case studies like you saw, photos like you said, 12 was it already? Maybe we need to be doing something every couple of weeks and get some information out. ⁓
If, just talking to our listeners, if you’ve enjoyed this episode and you want more expert-led practical advice, don’t forget to follow Animal Web across all of our social channels, but also to become a member of the website. Your membership does really support the experts that come on and give this advice and welfare information. So I hope that everybody’s found that useful. And once again, thank you, Misha, and I’m looking forward to sharing your articles with everybody. Thank you for having me, Helen.
