Last week, Basja had her first dental care. As my vet explained, it is textbook practice for horses to have regular dental care twice a year from the age of two and a half onwards. Basja is four, but, due to her life in the wild, she had skipped dental care previously. This dental care mostly consists of filing the teeth, but can also involve teeth extraction.
Horse skull. The toothless part is where the bits sits. By Vassil – Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1748825.
Historically, dental care is likely to have been practiced in all societies where horses were worked, both in under rider and in harness (a short history and pictures are available in Taylor et al., 2018).
In the Middle Ages in Europe, the first mandatory dental care mentioned by Jordanus Rufus is the removal of teeth at the age of three. It is not quite clear which teeth Rufus recommends removing, but he suggests these teeth would interfere with the bit, so there is good chance these are the first premolars, otherwise known as Wolf teeth. They are residual teeth, which are not involved in chewing food and can interfere with the action of the bit, being placed in the toothless part of the jaw. They are still removed today, a practiced considered as controversial by many vets. My own vet stated they do not interfere with the action of the bit in only 80% of cases; Basja fell in the 20% category, so she had Wolf teeth and some loose milk teeth extracted.
A wolf tooth, located just in front of the premolars. Copyrighted free use, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=320316
The other possibility, discussed by The Liminal Horse: Equitation and Boundaries Cover Paperback (trivent-publishing.eu), is that the teeth mentioned by Rufus as those needing extraction are canine teeth. These teeth typically develop in stallions, those some geldings and mares can grow them, too (they are the big teeth between the incisors and the toothless part on the image above). They are not extracted nowadays, and these are big teeth, so removing them would have been both painful and complicated.
Whatever these teeth are, they were to be pulled after the horses’ teeth have changed, which is between two and four years:
Et muez les denz, l’en doit le plus doucement que on puest esracher ceulz qui son en la maschouere dessoubz, c’est assavoir les .IIII. denz muez, ce sont deux d’un coste et deux de l’autre, lesquels on appelle scallions ou denz plains, qui sont encontre la garde du frein. [And when the teeth have changed, one must pull out, as gently as possible, those teeth which are on the lower [part] of the jaw, to wit the four teeth that have come in, two on one side and two on the other, which are called scallions or [and]69 flat teeth, which are touching the guard of the bit.]
Rufus states that, after the teeth have been removed and before the wounds are healed, the horse should be ridden with its regular bit, to improve responsiveness to the bit. I have always find this piece a little cruel, to say the least:
Et se il a la bouche tendre et douce, au secont jour depuis que on li ara esrachie les denz, ou au tiers jour, l’en li doit mettre le freim a barre aussi. Et comme j’ay dit, on le doit touzjours chevauchier doucement sanz rigueur en afrenant atempreement et le galoper. [And if he has a mouth tender and soft, the second day after you have gotten rid of the teeth, or on the third day, you must also put on him the a barre bit. And as I have said, we must always ride softly without severity and hold back/restrain him moderately and gallop/canter him.]
Imagine my surprise when I asked the vet when I can ride Basja next after her teeth extraction, and he said: “Tomorrow, if you want.” With my previous horses, I was told to wait for three days before putting the bit in, which is where my bitless bridle came in rather useful. I asked the vet again, to make sure it would not be painful. He said: “For sure it would be painful. But she had felt pain from the bit before, and it would be a different and lesser pain.”
I rode Basja in our beautiful medieval saddle – not the next day, but the day after – and she was her attentive and responsive self, maybe only a little more sensitive.
thegrailquest 