The big horse stood about sixteen-two and probably weighed in at over thirteen hundred pounds.  He was pretty proud of himself but had always been easy to handle until a couple weeks before his owner called me.  He was a real athlete and had earned top honors in several events, even conformation classes in his earlier years.  He was a superstar.  But lately he had developed some problems which were beginning to worry his caretakers, Bob and Jolene Smith.  Jodi, Bob’s daughter, owned the stallion, and came to the big stable several times each week to work with him.

      Big John was now standing at stud as well as light showing.  Bob had asked me to take a look at him.  I hadn’t done much work for the Smiths, just a dozen horses or so over the last few weeks.  As my horse dentistry practice was growing continually I was seeing a lot of folks for the first time lately.  Jodi had been reluctant to put more expense into Big John because she had already spent a few hundred dollars in the last couple of weeks with two veterinary services attempting to find our what was going on and had not seen any significant improvement in his behavior to date.  The big guy had slowed down on his eating and had become increasingly difficult to handle.  His usual cooperative manner had recently begun to change to one of irritability and even Bob said that handling him for breeding was becoming a little bit dangerous.  Jodi still showed him some and had noticed that he had begun to fight the bit continually lately.  The final straw had been when John had kicked out, barely missing Bob’s knee, en route to breed a mare.  Bob made a comment about a surgical procedure on Big John not being out of the question, then they knew they needed another approach.

      I had run across the work of both of the veterinary practices that had been on the case, and knew that they were top notch.  The vets were excellent at reproductive work, preventive health care, lameness problems, surgery, and most other aspects of equine health care.  Like most of us though, they though that horse dentistry was necessary only in rare cases, few and far between.  I was the same way for the first twenty-three years of practice until a horse dentist, Gregg McKee, invited me to an Equine Dentistry Conference and opened my eyes to the most neglected area of horse care today.