YORBA LINDA – Why the long face? Who do you call when your horse is long in tooth?

You might want to call Brian Borg, of Riverside, who offers equine dentistry under veterinarian supervision. He recently came to Yorba Linda and provided 16 horses with equine dental services in one day.

Just like their owners, good dental care in horses is necessary for good health of mind and body.

Horses' large and numerous teeth provide the optimum grazing tools, and given the fact that in Yorba Linda grazing is almost nil, local equines are daily developing toothy troubles. Our city horses are served all their meals in troughs and feeders, and their grazing tools are only used for a period of 45 minutes to an hour, causing uneven wearing of the teeth.

Perhaps if our friends, the horses, could talk, we could understand what they have been trying to tell us – which maybe they have a toothache, or the bit does not suit the mouth, or they have a sharp point cutting into their jaw tissue or cheek.

The age-old expression "long in the tooth" comes from the practice of telling a horse's age. A horse has 44 teeth; by the age of 9 months, all colts and fillies have all of their deciduous teeth, and by the age of 4 or 5, all the deciduous teeth have been replaced with the 44 adult horse teeth. Reaching the teenage years of 10, equines develop a groove on the incisors, called Galvayne's Groove. This is one of the tools that horse folks use to estimate the age of the horse.

Equine teeth wear at the rate of about an eighth of an inch a year. A horse will not run out of tooth enamel for more than 30 years.

Brian has the same type of state-of-the-art water drills used on humans, only Texas sized.

The horse is given a tranquilizer. A cleansing rinse, and the horse is tangoed to a horse stockade, which is a special chin rest. Brian's special speculum is placed in the mouth to hold the jaws open, or the horse would be chomping down with 800 pounds of pressure.

Yes, horses get cavities, and they get toothaches. These teeth problems result in behavior, performance and health issues. A quick checklist is asked of the equine owner including, does your horse demonstrate difficulty or hesitation to turn in one direction, show reluctance to accept the bit, toss the head without contact or grinding of teeth, have bad breath, slow chewing, wasting food or showing weight loss.

Brian indicates that if your horse is doing any one of these things, the equine needs a dental appointment, followed up with a big tooth brushing, dental floss and a peppermint rinse.

Reach Mary Carbone at 714... or bear-tracks1@juno.com.