Vikki Fowler - Veterinary Equine Dental Technician

Vikki Fowler - Veterinary Equine Dental Technician Equine veterinary dentistry service Qualified equine vet and qualified equine dental technician working solely in the field of dentistry.
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Based in South Lancashire, UK

16/06/2026

Have you seen the inside of a horses mouth? It goes a lot further back than most owners think! The last tooth ends about level with the eye.

Most surprising for owners is often the incredible size of the tongue. Just behind where the bit sits the tongue doubles in height. This is genioglossus muscle (grass muscle).

This has a huge impact on bitting and is the reason why I personally hate spade or spoon bits. The size and length of this tongue is also the reason why tongue tying is completely pointless and purely harmful.

Understanding anatomy is so important for all owners, so you can make educated decisions on what equipment you use on your horse.

14/06/2026

Does every horse need their incisors worked on? In my opinion, no.

There is a recent trend going on where people are doing incisor work on every horse. This is not just unnecessary, it can be harmful.

When I am working I always ask myself, "Will this leave the horse better off?", before I do anything. The second question is "Could this do any harm?".

To understand if the horse is better off, we need to understand how the incisors work. When the incisors are in contact, the cheek teeth are not. When the jaw is moved sideways so the cheek teeth are in contact, the incisors are not. This video clearly shows this in a normal horse with normal teeth.

Small corner hooks, small slants, small smiles will not prevent the horse's cheek teeth or TMJ (the jaw joint) from working as normal. Hopefully this is obvious from the video.

Second question, will it cause harm? Incisors are not like cheek teeth. They are far more delicate, prone to fractures from outside forces, prone to overheating and their nerves sit far closer to the chewing surface. So if we work on them, we need to be very sure it's for a good reason and not just because we want our horses to look like they've been to Turkey for dental implants!

The vast majority of severe incisor issues I see are a direct result of cheek teeth pathology. The cheek teeth are far larger, have far more power going through them and are far more likely to impact the incisors than the other way around. Unfortunately the Facebook business page doesn't allow videos and photos on the same post. But if you watch the video through, I have added some incisors that I have corrected. These were all caused by very severe cheek teeth issues, not the other way around. If the cheek teeth issues are caught early, then the incisors will self correct. If the incisors have formed a large enough overgrowths to cause a lock out, then they need help, but will often self correct once the worst of it has been taken down, providing the cheek teeth issues have been resolved.

We must remember that horses do not have infinite amount of tooth like rabbits do. They do continuously erupt, but they have closed roots and so they will eventually run out. When we take the surface of the tooth away, we are shortening its lifespan. We absolutely must have a good reason for doing it.

When I look at incisors that are not normal, I want to find the reason for the imbalance before I do anything. Sometimes the horse has a wry nose (the nose is slightly crooked) which results in a slant. Correcting this is pointless, it will reform. All we are doing is shortening the tooth lifespan. If the cause is the cheek teeth then fix the cheek teeth, make sure the incisors aren't impinging and reassess at the next appointment.

When incisors do need work, it is in their own right. If we are missing an incisor then we must reduce the opposing tooth and do the job of the tooth that is missing. If we have a displaced tooth that doesn't wear correctly as it doesn't line up, we must reduce that tooth to avoid soft tissue damage. If we have a parrot mouth or sow mouth where the teeth do not meet to wear each other down, then we must step in and make this reduction.

What we must never do is reduce incisors to make the cheek teeth meet. Because they shouldn't meet until the jaw is moved sideways to chew!

So how many of the horses I treat do I work on their incisors? Maybe 1 in 20, roughly. And always with great care!!

12/06/2026

Please please needle train your horses.

Every horse is going to need an IV injection at some point in their life. It might be to save their life from colic or it might be sedation every 6 months for their dental exam. What you don't want to do is wait until it's life threatening. The stress involved at that pivotal moment when a horse is fighting and won't allow the injection just isn't necessary.

I am seeing more and more needle shy horses nowadays. I suspect we are doing a lot more investigating and intervention than ever before and one bad experience can cause issues for life. If you can train the horse to stand for an IV injection before it is necessary, then the chances of it going wrong to start with are greatly reduced. You can also retrain a horse that is already needle shy.

This is my 17.2hh warmblood, Adonis. He's not a fan of needles. I mean, who is?!? But I can inject him worry free without anyone holding him or him being tied. Because he is trained. I don't try and hide what I'm doing, I show him the needle, I let him understand what is happening and he willingly stands for me.

This video is a fabulous starting point to explain the process
https://youtu.be/MRAIdnQmzak

I would highly recommend asking your vet to give you a needle and syringe with the needle snapped off the hub. I find this leaves just enough of a point to give them a poke that simulates an injection without actually hurting them. Most vets will happily do this and will show you how to raise the vein and simulate the injection as closely as possible for maximum effect. Once the horse is comfortable with you doing this, ask friends to do the same. When the time comes for the real IV injection, it will be stress free.

Note - I feel I had best pre-empt the Facebook experts that I know will have an opinion on this video. It will also tell me who has made it to the end before offering their opinion 😅
I choose to inject off the needle. Some vets will detach the needle to find the vein, then reattach the syringe to inject. The reason for this is to make sure they are not in the artery. Injecting in the artery can be fatal. However I find this fiddly, it takes longer and you can still end up in the artery as you reattach the syringe. Instead I use a shorter needle, I pause before drawing back as the arterial pressure will result in blood in the syringe without the draw back, I check the colour before depressing the syringe and I intermittently pull back again to make sure it hasn't shifted. There isn't a right or wrong here, it's whatever the professional feels most comfortable doing.
Also worth adding that only vets can inject IV in the UK. I know this isn't the case in other countries.

I do love this organisation. They are such a passionate and professional group of people 🥰
11/06/2026

I do love this organisation. They are such a passionate and professional group of people 🥰

The importance of looking closely!! This is a very zoomed in photo. This hook is tiny (blue outline) and at the very bac...
10/06/2026

The importance of looking closely!! This is a very zoomed in photo. This hook is tiny (blue outline) and at the very back of the mouth, almost hidden by the soft palate. And yet it has sliced open the back of this pony's mouth (red circle). Accessing things like this are a huge part of why I love the motorised equipment I use. This would be so very difficult to remove with a hand rasp whilst avoiding soft tissue damage. With the motorised burr, it took a moment and no tissue damage.

Remember routine dentistry is basic care, not a luxury.

Every horse needs regular dental work. I hope this is widely known by now. But just in case, I'll repeat it again. We ha...
08/06/2026

Every horse needs regular dental work. I hope this is widely known by now. But just in case, I'll repeat it again.

We have domesticated horses. We have changed their head shapes from the wild horses. We have changed their diets, including those that live out grazing, it's mostly on soft grass that is not like their wild diet, and hay is even less natural. We are responsible for their existence and we are responsible for keeping them pain free.

This photos are just a few horses with good mouths, straight teeth, good diets and still they become so sharp that they have lacerated their cheeks due to being overdue their routine dentals. This is super easy to prevent. Once or twice a year dental appointments will stop this happening.

Remember routine dentistry is basic care, not a luxury!

I thought I would share this slide from one of our lectures today at the BAEDT Congress. This was a talk given by Spille...
06/06/2026

I thought I would share this slide from one of our lectures today at the BAEDT Congress. This was a talk given by Spillers feeds. As you may have noticed from my page, I am very very keen on making sure horses are given adequate forage/fibre. Not just for their dental health but also their gut health and mental health.

I'd particularly like to draw attention to what "dry matter" is. Recently I have been regularly told a horse is being fed 1.5% of their body weight (BW). But this recommendation is for DRY MATTER. This does not mean before soaking!! Hay is 15% moisture even before soaking. Dry matter is something measured in a laboratory when every little molecule of moisture is pulled out. It is not a real life figure. In real life it is closer to 1.8% BW of hay or 2.4% BW of haylage (haylage has a much higher moisture content).

Something I learnt today is that soaking hay actually reduces the dry matter content and so you need to feed even more of it, more like over 2% BW. Obviously this is weighed BEFORE soaking.

We talk about dry matter because of all this variability in our forages. Dry matter is a way of standardising the requirement. If you are unclear on what the dry matter of your forage is, I would advise reaching out to an independent nutritionalist to help formulate a healthy diet for your horse.

The second point I would raise is that this 1.5% dry matter is about fibre, not calories. As humans we are use to talking about how many calories we should eat. We don't really pay much attention to our fibre intake, even though we should eat over 25g of fibre a day ourselves. For horses, fibre is the important figure. If we drop below this 1.5% BW dry matter, the horse's gut is not getting enough fibre to function properly. This can leave them susceptible to things like stomach ulcers and colic. We can reduce their calories as much as possible but we must be very very careful to never drop below this 1.5% BW dry matter. Effective ways of reducing the calories in their forage are things like soaking hay, feeding unfertilised hay, and feeding good quality straw (replacing up to 50% of their hay).

When talking about geriatric equines with poor teeth that cannot eat hay, haylage or straw, we must still obey this 1.5% BW dry matter. This is a lot more food than most owners think. For example 24 x Stubb scoops of happy hoof a day!!

As a continuation from the previous post about old horses. Here on the left hand side we have a 32 year old thoroughbred...
06/06/2026

As a continuation from the previous post about old horses.

Here on the left hand side we have a 32 year old thoroughbred that has had her teeth looked after all of her life by a qualified EDT and then myself (vet and qualified EDT). On the right we have a 27 year old Welsh A pony with a "sketchy" dental history. As you can see, despite being much older and much larger, the TB has perfect teeth whereas the Welsh A has already lost a large number of his. The TB can eat her hay as normal but the Welsh A needs a hay replacer diet.

Conformation of the teeth absolutely has an impact, but whether good or poor conformation, horses keep their teeth much longer if they have regular, good quality dentistry. Nowadays we expect our horses to live well into their 20s and 30s so we need to be extra vigilant about looking after their teeth. Feeding adequate qualities of hay replacer is a very expensive business!

So why does regular dentistry help the teeth last longer?
Dentistry involves a lot of biomechanics, similar to farriery. We aim to maintain balance across the whole mouth. In the same way that unbalanced feet will result in lameness issues, small dental imbalances can spiral to become major issues surprisingly quickly, which causes pain and tooth loss.

If I take a really basic example, sometimes one tooth becomes dominant over its opposing partner. There are several ways this can happen, even in a horse fed a natural diet and with good oral conformation.
- Sometimes when the adult teeth erupt in a young horse, they don't always erupt at the same time. If one comes through before its partner, it can become taller than the others before its partner manages to meet it.
- In old horses, the teeth slow their growth with age, but sometimes one tooth slows before its partner and the partner over grows.
- Another cause is when one tooth has a very mild deformity resulting in less enamel than its partner, and the partner overpowers it due to being harder and stronger.
- We can also see teeth with small chip fractures that doesn't kill the tooth, but does reduce the surface area allowing its partner to overpower it.

As you can see, this can happen to any horse over time, even if the teeth look straight, even if the horse lives a natural life, and even if the horse receives regular dental care. However when the horse receives regular care, the practitioner will address these overgrowths before they become issues. It might just be a millimetre here or there if caught early enough. Without correction, this spirals and causes further problems like diastema (gaps) or displacements (wonky teeth) due to the extra forces being put on the tooth pushing it over. This is particularly a problem in older horses where the crown is as long as the root. When the tooth becomes taller than all of the others, it is put under extra pressure and so the tooth is very slowly wobbled loose until it falls out.

This is just one example of the ways teeth can be lost. There are many others!

Having your horses teeth regularly looked after by a qualified professional pays dividends in the long run. The small payment once or twice a year will save you a fortune as the horse ages. Not just by preventing expensive referral procedures but also in hay replacer feed! Well worth it.

Remember routine dentistry is basic care, not a luxury.

05/06/2026

It's the BAEDT Congress this weekend, you might spot my name in the name tags 😁 Always a fabulous weekend of learning and connecting.

02/06/2026

My little (16.2 😅) warmblood 2 year old, Jupiter, would like everyone to know that he is losing his very first baby tooth. Poor little man is feeling rather tired and hard done by. He turned 2 at the end of February so he is a little early. But they rarely read the textbooks.

I think now that it is much more common to have exact dates of birth and recorded ages for our horses, it's become more oobvious to me that ageing by the teeth is really not an exact science, it's basically educated guesswork and should be treated as a ballpark figure.

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