Baker and Easley discuss dental exams that should be given to horses soon after birth, during the youthful performance years, as young adults, in maturity and in old age. They cover equipment, techniques, diseases and treatment, as well as the four types of teeth, how they develop and how they have evolved from a small horse-like animal living in South America more than 50 million years ago.
"Nobody has been in a position to get all of the material together and present it in cohesive fashion," Baker said. A textbook on surgery, written more than 80 years ago, addressed equine dentistry, he said, "but there was no discussion of underlying morphology."
"Prevention is better than curing," said Baker, who began documenting equine dental disease as a lecturer in veterinary surgery in 1965 at the Royal Veterinary College in London. "Once a horse presents with dental disease," he said, "it may already be beyond any treatment other than surgical intervention."
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Contact: Jim Barlow, Life Sciences Editor
b-james3@uiuc.edu
217-333-5802
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
5-Oct-1999