What are signs my horse needs dental care?

The signs that a horse needs dental care are more varied and more often missed than most horse owners realize, because equine dental problems rarely present as obvious dramatic symptoms in their early stages — they develop gradually and produce subtle behavioral, performance, and physical changes that are easy to attribute to other causes until the dental issue has progressed to the point where the condition has been present and worsening for months or years. Weight loss or difficulty maintaining weight is one of the most common and most diagnostically valuable signs of dental problems. A horse with painful or inefficient dentition cannot chew his feed properly — hay and grain that are not adequately ground before swallowing are not fully digested, and the horse extracts less nutritional value from his feed than a horse with normal dental function. The result is a horse that eats normal or even increased quantities of feed but fails to maintain weight or condition appropriately. Quidding — dropping partially chewed feed from the mouth during eating — is one of the clearest behavioral indicators of dental pain or dysfunction. A horse that quids is finding the chewing process painful or mechanically difficult and is dropping the feed before it is adequately processed rather than continuing to chew through the discomfort. Finding clumps of partially chewed hay or grain around the feed area or noticing the horse dropping feed while eating are specific observable signs that dental evaluation is warranted without delay. Performance changes that are not explained by other physical or training factors frequently have dental origins, particularly resistance to the bit, head tossing, one-sided stiffness, reluctance to take a specific lead, or difficulty with collection. The bit sits in the horse's mouth and communicates through contact with the bars, the tongue, and the corners of the lips — a horse with sharp points, hooks, or other dental irregularities that create pressure or pain when the bit applies contact will naturally resist or evade that contact. The resulting training difficulties are often addressed as behavioral problems or bit fit issues when the root cause is dental discomfort that a qualified equine dentist would identify and address in a single appointment.