Your Horse's Mouth Malocclusions

Your Horse's Mouth

COPYRIGHT ELSEVIER SCIENCE 2003

Your horse’s mouth can house up to 44 teeth (including the rare presence of lower wolf teeth). As accurately portrayed in the illustration above, the reserve crown (unexposed roots within the skull) extrude approximately 1/4 inch per year until they have expired. This illustration depicts the mouth of a horse without severe malocclusions, but still in need of equilibration to remove sharp points. We refer to this as a normal mouth.

We use this illustration of a normal mouth on our dental charts to draw in the various dental abnormalities we see in patients mouths, acknowledging the presence of wolf teeth, caps, hooks, ramps, waves, missing teeth, etc. Geldings and stallions have canines but usually mares do not. Upper wolf teeth are the most common while lower wolf teeth are rare.

The dotted line represents point removal, part of the equilibration process.

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