Equine Services
Our equine healthcare team provides ambulatory service or in-hospital care for the equine patient. Dr. John Reichert, Dr. Tracie Hoggarth, Dr. Dick Roth, Dr. Tanya Borud, and Dr. Roger Jorgenson provide the Fargo-Moorhead and surrounding communities with large animal care.
Below is a list of some of the available Equine services. If you have any additional questions please email us at tech@valleyveterinary.net or call us at (701) 232-3391.
Dentistry
Equine Dental Examination and FloatingAfter a dental oral examination, our veterinarians may use either manual floating techniques (with hand rasps) or a PowerFloat instrument to perform the dental procedure. Oftentimes, a combination of both techniques is used to address the abnormal dental conditions that your horse's mouth has developed.
Both techniques use a tungsten-carbide blade to smooth the sharp points and other dental abnormalities that occur due to normal wear on a horse's mouth. Hand tools involve a back and forth motion to decrease the size of the points whereas the PowerFloat uses a rotary motion.
A brief explanation to equine dental terminology:
- Floating: means "to smooth". More recently called dental reduction or dental equilibration.
- Points: Sharp tooth projections on the inside of the lower jaw near the tongue and on the outside of the upper jaw near the cheek from normal dental wear that can cause sores/injuries to the cheek and tongue.
- Hooks: Sharp tooth projections on the front of the upper row of jaw "grinding teeth" or on the back of the bottom row of jaw "grinding teeth" that can cause injury to the tongue and cheek
- Ramp: Sloping surfaces that can have sharp edges on the premolar/molars of the jaw that can cause tongue or cheek injury.
A combination of factors are the cause of horses needing their teeth floated, including:
Wolf teeth are small teeth located on the top jaw in some horses. Sometimes because of their small, undeveloped root structure they "fall out" with normal chewing/wear. However, historically some horsemen have had concerns with the wolf-teeth causing problems with the bit. Have your veterinarian evaluate if your horse's wolf teeth are still present and they will advise you if extraction is recommended.
- Due to the change of diet that horses are fed compared to what they ate as wild horses (we feed our horses concentrates of grain, etc).
- Horses being bred selected on confirmation, color, size, disposition (not necessarily for "good teeth").
- Horses are living longer lives due to good husbandry care at home (thus wild horses typically did not live long enough to have severe dental disease).
With routine dental care, only the abnormal and likely painful part of the tooth is removed. Because horses teeth continually erupt, floating of teeth will not cause premature loss of teeth (in fact, will help keep teeth and equine healthy as long as possible). With age, eventually horses can loose their teeth due to life longevity but normal, routine floating will not speed up that process.
Our general recommendations for dental oral examination are every horse with normal dentition (no overbite, aka "parrot-mouth", or underbite, aka "monkey jaw") yearly starting at 4 years of age. More frequent oral examinations are recommended on our geriatric equine patients (e.g. every 6 months on every horse over 12 years of age).
Lameness Examinations
Coggins Testing (Test for Equine Infectious Anemia)
Vaccination and Deworming Recommendations:
Emergency Care
Reproductive Evaluation
Radiography
Ultrasound
Surgery
Breeding assistance
Referral services specialists