Take a bite of equine dentistry
A fast growing field of horse specialization is equine dentistry. As unlikely as it sounds, many horse related illnesses can be traced to bad teeth. And bad teeth lead to bad nutrition which leads to bad feelings in the horse.
While Carl Stuckey’s left hand wrestled with a flopping pink tongue the size and consistency of a large eel, he tried to maintain a grip on a long, saliva-slimed drill straight from a dental phobic’s nightmare.
Stuckey wasn’t bothered at all that his arm was up to the elbow in teeth, his boots covered in a milky drool. After all, he spent 21 years working in nuclear-waste cleanup. Compared to that, filing down a horse’s incisor is a blast.
“I love it to death,” Stuckey said after nearly an hour of grinding on the teeth of a 10-year-old Tennessee walking horse named Jayrue. “You open up the mouth, and it tells you the whole story. And I fix the problems, and it makes that horse healthy.”
As my own equine dentist says, “It all starts in the mouth.”