Episode Details

There is a turf war between veterinarians and non-veterinarians, both wanting to provide horses with preventive dental care. It started in the late 1990s and has gained protection behind laws meant to protect horse owners. But is there proof that any approach to floating is better than another? Or is it just positioning based on territorialism? I used the following script to make this podcast, but I also added to it freely to emphasize several points.

This podcast is more formal than usual because I am reading a script I wrote in response to a graduate of my dentistry school challenged by the Veterinary Medical Association of her area. She is a non-veterinarian working in equine dentistry. Most of the United States allows individual states to determine what a profession is, and most states broadly state that veterinarians are the ones to perform medicine, surgery, and dentistry on any animal. This statement includes fish, reptiles, birds, and any other animal other than humans. It is the prerogative of the veterinary board to investigate anyone who does any work on any animal in their state. However, routine care of animals, including preventive medicine, is usually avoided. You can purchase and administer vaccines and dewormers, adjust angles on hooves, apply therapeutic shoes, prepare any mixture of medicinal supplements, breed horses, deliver foals, apply linaments, clip the hair of horses not shedding, splint crooked legs of foals, adjust bones, massage muscles, use red light, PEMF, and a dozen more things to a horse without being a veterinarian. But you cannot remove the unworn parts of the cheek teeth in horses, digging their sharp edges into the tongue and cheeks and causing pain with every movement of their jaw and tongue.

I have been training veterinarians and non-veterinarians in the technique of Horsemanship Dentistry. My definition of this form of working on the teeth of horses is as follows:

1) Removing sharp points from horses' cheek teeth by filing them to a smooth edge is commonly called "floating teeth" but is also known as odontoplasty. The root cause of most dental problems is pain in the tongue and cheeks caused by sharp enamel points. Therefore, routine maintenance of the horse's teeth removes pain from these sharp points. Secondary to the removal of sharp points is finding pathology and addressing this.

2) Administering sedatives to horses for routine floating is unnecessary; instead, horsemanship skills are used for 97% of horses (from annual data consistent over the past decade). The remaining 3% are horses that are reactive to pain, fear the process, or have a painful procedure done, such as extracting a fractured cheek tooth. With those, I administer pain and anxiolytic medications.

My name is Geoff Tucker, and I am a veterinarian who graduated from The New York State College of Veterina