Horse Mouth Diseases

Horse mouth diseases are broken up into two categories, which are dental diseases and soft tissue diseases. Learn about mouth diseases in horses, such as periodontal disease, abscesses and mouth ulcers with information from a veterinarian in this free video on horse mouth diseases.

Yeah, I'm Dr. Gary Garcia of Keystone Equine Associates of Odessa, Florida and we're outside of Tampa. I want to say a little bit about mouth diseases in horses; it kind of break that up into two categories; dental and soft tissue. Although dental diseases, there, there's just an array of, of, of problems in dentistry in horses. There's Malocclusions meaning the misalignment of teeth. There's, there's different types of, of of situation where the teeth ramp and wave and, and just cause poor chewing and, and poor digestion of the feeding horse. So it's important to get your Veterinarian involve and get your horse's teeth check regularly at least once a year and floated accordingly. And, and again some of these teeth issues can, can lead to abscesses in the mouth; they can lead to tumors that are of a dental origin in the mouth and again, these are devastating for your horse and that your horse can drop weight and, and can get quite ill from these. So we, we ask you to get that checked out quite a bit. If you see your horse dropping feed or you're having problems with your, with your bit; your horse is not responding to the bit; those are all indications of dental disease. And we see periodontal disease in horses; we see dental issues where the immature teeth do not release themselves and retain themselves, so we, we need you to check that. And then the other thing that we want to talk about is soft tissue where there can be ulcers in their mouth and in their tongues. These have to be checked as well. They can be quite painful to the horse. Some of the masses the masses that we do see in the mouth are melanomas more commonly in Grey horses. We see squamous cell carcinomas which in Florida we see a lot of because we, we get a lot of sunlight and intense sunlight and that stimulates some of the squamous cell carcinomas. And we see adenomas and adenocarcinomas in the mouth as well. And then there is one reportable disease in horses called Vesicular Stomatitis that we need to report because it mimics the foot and mouth disease that is devastating to, to cattle in this country and horse will also mimic that disease. So any Vesicular lesion, lesions or, or on the mouth should be reported to a Veterinarian and should be followed up. Again, this is Dr. Gary Garcia of Keystone Equine Associates in Odessa, Florida. We urge you to contact your local Equine Veterinarian for further information and questions or you can log on to our website at keystoneequine.com. Thank you.