A guide to estimating a horse's age by looking at its teeth. The video explains how different teeth develop and wear over time, showing the specific changes that reveal whether a horse is young, middle-aged, or old.
Hello, welcome back to Como. In this video, I'm going to show you or try to explain a way to tell how old a horse is. This is where the saying goes about the gift horse, don't look at its teeth. That means that if you're given a horse as a gift, don't look at its teeth, because you can tell more or less how old it is by its teeth. So if you're given a horse as a gift, it doesn't matter if it's very young or very old. And here we're going to look at its teeth. These front teeth are what they use to cut the grass and eat. And thanks to these teeth, depending on how curved they are, when they're very young, they're very straight. There are some for milk, then they change them to later have fixed ones. Then in the area here, they have the teeth that crush the food. When horses eat, they bend their jaws and eat. Not like we do, who crush it, but they crush it from the side. Since this horse is a male, it has these two other teeth here that many females don't have. These two that we have here on the sides. This one here are the ones that have. If we open our mouths wide here in the back, we can see the back teeth the horse can't bite us through here. This is where we can find the teeth. Do you see? If we open our mouths wide in the back, it's going to be hard. We'll put some images later. In the back we have the teeth that they're going to use to chew. And we can see how little by little, as the horse gets older, the teeth wear down and curve forward. A very young horse will have them much straighter and obviously not as worn. We can see that this horse already has them a little worn. Even in this one here we can see a little tab that this one doesn't have yet. So we can see how old it is. This one here, as I said, is approximately 12 years old. And now we're going to show you some small images so that you can understand a little better how a horse's teeth evolve. And then see how old they are approximately, appropriately. Okay. A foal at birth only has two incisors on each side of its jaw. And as it grows, other baby teeth emerge. Foals have 24 temporary teeth that are much smaller than the permanent ones. The upper jaw has six incisors and three molars on each side. The lower jaw has six incisors and 3 molars on each side. Horses have between 36 and 40 permanent teeth. This is due to the paths. Males always have two on each side, while some females have very small ones and others do not even have them. There are six incisors on each jaw, therefore 12. The permanent teeth are six teeth on each side of both jaws. Therefore we have 24 teeth in total, 36. Plus the four canines that, as we have said, all males have and some females do not have them at all. Here we can see the teeth that foals have from birth to four and a half years old. First they have two temporary incisors at birth. Then when they are one month old, they have four temporary incisors and three temporary molars on each side. After six to nine months they have six temporary incisors. At one year they have four molars. At one and a half years they already have five molars, as we can see in the image. At six and a half years, two permanent teeth replace the two temporary ones. As we can see, it would be what we mark in black. At three and a half years they have four permanent incisors. At four years, four canines and six molars. And at four and a half years the six incisors are permanent. Here we see the evolution of the mouth of a horse that is already more than 6 years old from 6 to 25 years. The contact point of the incisors and the wear of the contact surface indicate the age of the animals. As we can see, this is an image of a horse that is 8, 10, 12, 15, 20 and 25 years old. As we can see, it has a tendency to pull the Galvan groove forward. Here, as we can see in this image we can see the evolution of a groove that appears on one of the teeth. This serves to indicate the age of the horse between 10 and 30 years. It appears at 10 years old as a small channel at the top of the angle of the tooth. At 15 years old it already reaches the middle of the tooth and at 20 years old it reaches its base. Then it begins to fill in. And at 30 years old, the groove has disappeared completely. We hope you enjoyed this video. If you have any questions, you know where to find us on thepage.com and if you want anything else, leave us a comment. Give us a like, share it with us, whatever you want. We have other very interesting videos about horses. Thank you very much and see you soon.
