Dear Sylvia -- Dogs and horses often have dental calculus also. I would
encourage you to look for correlation between the presence of calculus and
the following other factors:
* Maloccluding teeth, especially in herbivores, i.e. 'wave mouth' or the
M1's being much more worn down than adjacent teeth
* Broken teeth, missing teeth
* Impacted teeth
* Badly erupted or malformed teeth that erupt out of normal alignment in
the tooth row
* In horses, broken, missing, or uneven incisors
* Teeth on one side worn or shaped differently than on the opposite side.
Calculus tends to form whenever one of two conditions obtains in the life
of the animal -- either it is sick, so that the chemical composition of
the saliva and its enzymatic content changes, or else it cannot "clean".
To "clean" is the action you take when you've been eating Wheat Thins
crackers -- you take your tongue (or your finger) and you run it up into
the buccal pouch between your teeth and your cheek, and push or scrape the
sticky material off the teeth. While the human can reach the buccal pouch
with the tongue (or finger), and dogs can do it (to a lesser extent) with
their tongue, really to "clean" the dog needs to gnaw on something. But he
will not do this if:
(a) There is nothing to gnaw on (unlikely)
(b) He is incapable of effective gnawing, i.e. for example it's a toy
breed with very weak bite strength
(c) His teeth are damaged or maloccluding or abscessed, so that it hurts
him to gnaw and he therefore avoids it.
With herbivores, including horses, cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs, their
snout is too long and the sagittal frenulum of the tongue placed too far
anteriorly to permit the free tip to be able to curl back into the buccal
pouch. To "clean", these animals must depend upon the free lateral
excursion of the jaws, which acts to do two things:
1. When the jaw swings all the way to the right, it pulls the left cheek
taut against the buccal surfaces of the teeth, acting to squish
accumulated food material back into the central oral cavity;
2. Promote the free flow of saliva from the ducts located in the buccal
cavity, so as to help lubricate and wash material out.
This is why calculus thickens along the buccal surface of the cheek tooth
row in horses. It is quite serious when they have malocclusions that
create crenellations, "smiles", or slopes, or else missing
teeth/hypereruption in the incisive dentition -- because these types of
problems block the free lateral excursion of the jaws. The development of
"points", i.e. failure to wear the ectoloph as fast as the more medial
portions of the cheek teeth, can do the same thing in both horses and in
hypsodont artiodactyls.
One last factor that must be considered is diet. I've been collecting
horse skulls for many years, and can tell you that prior to about 1985, I
saw very few horse teeth with either significant gum disease or caries,
and in the cases where those occurred, there was obvious accompanying
pathology, i.e. for example a separation between teeth that should have
been abutting in the tooth row, so that food material could pack into the
space, creating caries, abscessing, and pain. However, in about the
mid-1980's one of the big U.S. animal feed companies (we will not name it
here) started putting tons of molasses into their bagged feed. This was
because their marketing department made the remarkable discovery that
horses don't go into feed stores. But if you mix enough sugar into the
grain, to the human it smells like breakfast cereal, and mmm' boy, that
MUST be good. Naturally since this made the product fly off the shelves,
every other feed company swifly followed suit, and then I began to see not
only huge amounts of calculus but actual gumline caries -- I mean teeth
rotted an eighth of an inch deep along the entire length of the buccal
surface of the cheek tooth row.
Now, ancient people were not capable of this kind of mistake (or prone to
quite as much foolishness) but if the animals were grain-fed, they will
also have a higher likelihood of calculus, caries, and excessive wear to
the teeth (the latter because if the feed was milled, typically it would
not also have been sifted).
Hope this acts to broaden out your thinking on this subject. I am always
interested to hear of cases of either calculus or caries in animals from
archeological sites.
Sincerely,
Deb Bennett, Ph.D., Director
Equine Studies Institute of California
> Hello Everyone
>
> When I report on pathology I tend to mention the presence of dental
> calculus in passing. It seems to turn up most frequently on sheep/goat
> teeth in the assemblages that come my way.
>
> I understand how it forms but have any investigations been done into what
> this might indicate in terms of husbandry practise and diet?
>
> Many Thanks
>
> Sylvia
>
> Dr Sylvia Warman
> Environmental Officer
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