The Veterinarian Dentist

Our equine dentist is a licensed veterinarian who only does teeth and loves it. Yesterday while assisting him with a few of my horses we started discussing sedation. He gave me some tips about how it works after I asked if my horse was sweating from the sedative or from the sympathetic nervous system being activated. He explained how the chemicals lie on some of the cells and don’t activate them ….. ok, honestly I have no idea what he said but something like that, but the bottom line was that it was the sedation. We kept discussing training and sedation. Then he said he wanted to get better with horses and someday be able to do his job without sedation much like a dentist he saw in a video. He said the dentist would take 45 minutes to 1 hour for each horse but it was what he called ‘Real Horsemanship.’ He talked about how the man would approach the horse, just stand there engage in a conversation and soon the tools would be working and the dentistry would be done. (Funny thing is I had a dentist like this in the past). Now, some argue it’s impossible to really get to the back of the horse’s mouth without a speculum and I wonder about that too but the point isn’t that, it’s horsemanship – the new way of being, or perhaps the old way of being.