Wednesday, August 22, 2007

Floating teeth

Horse tooth. Photo by Bruce Spencer.The other day my daughter walked up from the barn with an object in her hand. I knew what it was right away - roughly a cubic inch of bone - and was a little saddened to see it. The object was a horse tooth. Our old quarter horse Moses had lost it in his stall. Moses is thirty something and his teeth are going bad. He can’t bite hard food like apples or carrots anymore, and really doesn’t do all that well with grass, so each morning and evening we feed him about half a bucket of ground up grain that comes in pellets. On top of this we include a couple of hands full of alfalfa cubes and a cup of water to soften everything – basically its mush or oatmeal. He does very well with these meals.

We have a local large animal veterinarian check our horses over about every six months. When Moses was younger (before we owned him) he often had his teeth “floated.” That’s a process of rasping the teeth smooth – many horse develop sharp points on their teeth which causes them to be uneven – that makes grinding grain or grass rather difficult.

Moses. Photo by Bruce SpencerWe’d had Moses about a year the first time our vet came out to float his teeth. Now, in the old days vets actually use a big hand rasp or file to float teeth, but now-a-days many of them use a drill with a special bit that has a grinder on the end. That’s what our vet intended to use. He told us, however, that the sound of the drill often spooks horses, so it was his practice to give them a mild sedative – kind of the equivalent of Valium. The sedative tends to make a horse want to drop his head and fall a sleep, but its very difficult to pick up a horse’s head – they are heavy - so the vet had a special harness to hold the head up. Sounds complicated, doesn’t it. So here’s the picture…

Side view of horse tooth. Photo by Bruce SpencerMoses is on Valium, half asleep. His head is in this harness that’s held up by a rope over a pulley that I’m holding with one hand. The vet has a drill going with a six to eight inch bit stuck in Moses’ mouth... and says, “his tongue is in the way, hold it to the side.” I looked at him like he was crazy, but knew I had to do it so I grabbed this giant slimy tongue and held it to the side of the horse's mouth, all they while thinking, “I’m paying big bucks to do this.” The vet worked on Moses’ teeth for a while and his head kept getting heavier. The vet kept saying, “hold his head up,” and I’d pull on the rope a little more. All the time I’m noticing that Moses is swaying on his legs, but I didn’t say anything because I was thinking, "the vet has done this dozens of times, I'm being paranoid, he knows what he's doing." All of a sudden Moses’ legs buckle on one side and he falls over in slow motion. Surprised the hell out of him, I could see it in his eyes, but he couldn’t get up. And the vet says, “huh, that never happened before.” Moses was fine, but it ends up, because he was an older horse, he couldn’t take the usual dose of the sedative. The vet somehow never bothered to float his teeth again.