Age of horse...teeth or papers?

[Gayla]

So, I bought a starved mare from Craig's list and she came with QH papers. I had her teeth floated as soon as she was mine so if that was contributing to her weight problem in any way I would know. But I didn't really look at her teeth. So today I take my Mom out to see her since she hasn't seen her since she was a skeleton. My Mom is a non horsey person and loves to look at their teeth. She (me too) thought this mare would have big long teeth and she thinks they are so weird...well...I lift up her lip and lo and behold she has teeth of a 9-10 year old horse. Now, I know that aging horses by their teeth is totally inaccurate but I do consider it like looking at people, you can for the most part get the "general" range of their age. Her papers say she is 18...her teeth don't put her a day over 10. She is from a very checkered past...no reason to think the papers are legit or not. If this were your horse...what would you think? P.S. I doesn't really matter to me either way just intriguing. :winkgrin:

[Gayla]

Well, well, well, I just got the papers out and looked at the markings on the back and they are different than the mare. I compared to pictures and the face marking is different and it is missing two back socks. Very funny. :)

[Bluey]

Well, well, well, I just got the papers out and looked at the markings on the back and they are different than the mare. I compared to pictures and the face marking is different and it is missing two back socks. Very funny. :)

Not so funny, horse is not who it was represented to be, papers don't match it.
Ask the seller if he made a mistake on the papers and the real papers are in his hand.

A friend once asked me to try a horse she had bought and, looking at the tattoo on the horse, he was not who he was supposed to be in the papers that came with the horse.
She didn't even know the horse had a tattoo.
Didn't matter, the horse was very nice and ended up as theraphy horse for a handicapped kid, they still have him, so it didn't need any papers there.:)

When buying a registered horse, even at a reputable horse sale, please look at the papers and that they match the horse.
Mistakes can happen.:yes:

[Gayla]

Not so funny, horse is not who it was represented to be, papers don't match it.
Ask the seller if he made a mistake on the papers and the real papers are in his hand.

A friend once asked me to try a horse she had bought and, looking at the tattoo on the horse, he was not who he was supposed to be in the papers that came with the horse.
She didn't even know the horse had a tattoo.
Didn't matter, the horse was very nice and ended up as theraphy horse for a handicapped kid, they still have him, so it didn't need any papers there.:)

When buying a registered horse, even at a reputable horse sale, please look at the papers and that they match the horse.
Mistakes can happen.:yes:
I don't care about the papers. I saved the horse without knowing one thing about it except she needed some TLC and a home. I would think it is very exciting that she might be a tad younger than represented just so we could have more time together. I am in love with her! :D

[unbridledoaks]

Speaking of mistakes on papers. I use to own a gelding and on his papers it said the was gelded 4 days before he was born..... I was like Oh wow! LOL!

[jennywho]

Wonderful for you to take the horse in and for falling in love with her. Congrats on getting something younger than you initially thought. Since the markings don't match I would go by the teeth rather than the papers.

Funny story, I used to work for a racehorse trainer that had a gelding I adored. Everytime we ran him (this is in Oregon mind you) the IDer would look at his tatoo and then his papers and then his tatoo and then his papers and then make some comment similar to whatever and go on to the next horse.

Fast forward a couple of years when I was trying to rehome the horse and the lady that bought him tried to look up his history. His name was Prevasive Force and there was another horse born the same year with the same sire named Persuasive Force. It might have been just a coincidence, but the trainer was a crook and to this day I wonder.

[LarkspurCO]

She might be nine. She might be nineteen. Who cares? She might live to be forty anyway. Beyond five or six, they say it's all guesswork. One of my feedlot rescues was "aged" by her teeth as four years old. She told me she was much older than that, and I believe her.

The dentist/vet worked on my 7 y/o TB this week. His comment: "Just looking at his teeth I would have guessed this to be a 25-year-old horse... You really can't age a horse by his teeth..." or some such.

[Bluey]

She might be nine. She might be nineteen. Who cares? She might live to be forty anyway. Beyond five or six, they say it's all guesswork. One of my feedlot rescues was "aged" by her teeth as four years old. She told me she was much older than that, and I believe her.

The dentist/vet worked on my 7 y/o TB this week. His comment: "Just looking at his teeth I would have guessed this to be a 25-year-old horse... You really can't age a horse by his teeth..." or some such.

You can't age a horse to the exact year, but we have made a game of going thru the sale horses in catalog sales and guessing at the age and have a practically 100% hit on all ages of horses, most times within one year each way, even in the horses in their teens.
I even guessed correctly on a 14 year old, that I also guessed was a light cribber, looking at his teeth, both confirmed by the owner when he came by.
There are no horses older than the teens at sales. generally.
So, yes, if you look at enough teeth and know what you are looking at, you can come fairly close.
That doesn't mean that there may be not a few exceptions out there, where you just can't tell.:yes:

Now, a veterinarian or dentist may know a lot about teeth, other than how to age a horse, if they don't practice it on horses of known ages, like we have done for years.;)

[Gayla]

You can't age a horse to the exact year, but we have made a game of going thru the sale horses in catalog sales and guessing at the age and have a practically 100% hit on all ages of horses, most times within one year each way, even in the horses in their teens.
I even guessed correctly on a 14 year old, that I also guessed was a light cribber, looking at his teeth, both confirmed by the owner when he came by.
There are no horses older than the teens at sales. generally.
So, yes, if you look at enough teeth and know what you are looking at, you can come fairly close.
That doesn't mean that there may be not a few exceptions out there, where you just can't tell.:yes:

Now, a veterinarian or dentist may know a lot about teeth, other than how to age a horse, if they don't practice it on horses of known ages, like we have done for years.;)
I agree here. I would never say that I could tell a horse's exact age but I think you can get a general idea of what phase of life they are in. There is another horse at the barn her exact age. I will check out his teeth today.

[LarkspurCO]

It's been demonstrated over and over again that aging by teeth is unreliable:

http://www.equisearch.com/horses_care/health/dentistry/eqteeth2503/

Judging Horse Age from Teeth
Just how old is that horse? If you think the truth can always be found in his mouth, you may have swallowed an old horse-trader's line. By Karen Smith

How can you tell if that horse you're examining is in his prime or over the hill? You could try pinching his skin, as Arab horsemen did. You could feel his jawbone, judge the distance between his ribs or look for a hollow above each eye. The body equine reveals its age in many ways: An older horse's skin is less pliable and "drier" than that of a younger horse, his jawbone is thinner and sharper, his ribs are spaced farther apart and his eyes sit deeper in their sockets. But none of these "tests" offers anything approaching the reliability of the one you're most likely to use: aging a horse by the appearance of his front teeth. Only registration papers recording the actual birth year provide a more consistently accurate indicator of a horse's age. Still, that doesn't mean that teeth are always truthful.

The method itself is ancient. Chinese drawings from as early as 700 B.C. show men looking in horses' mouths to determine the animals' ages. Common parlance still makes reference to the custom: Everyone knows it's impolite to "look a gift horse in the mouth." The practice dates back to a 19th-century Australian horse trainer and master of self-promotion, Sydney Galvayne, whose name is still associated with a telltale groove that appears on older horses' teeth. Illustrations of age-related changes in equine incisors based on Galvayne's system continue to appear in veterinary and horse-care texts. Only recently has research revealed that this technique--like any other long-held belief--has its exceptions and limitations.

Within the past four years, studies of age-related dental changes carried out in Britain and Belgium have confirmed what many suspected: Teeth do lie about age. One study demonstrated that even professionals who frequently examine horses' mouths can make honest mistakes in judging age based on the shape, coloration and configuration of the upper and lower incisors. In some cases, the experts were off by as much as seven or eight years. Other studies linked exceptions to the usual rules of dentition with breed and individual variations, or with diet and management practices.

In most horse-related transactions, age matters: A 12-year-old is a better investment as a broodmare than a 20-year-old; a four-year-old with lumpy ankles may have a shorter athletic life than a 10-year-old with similar enlargements; a two-year-old often requires different handling than a three-year-old; a selling price that's right on the mark for a seven-year-old is out of the ballpark for a 17-year-old. When legitimate documentation of a horse's birth date settles the critical question of age once and for all, the condition of his incisors is purely a matter of health care and management. But for the hordes of unregistered or otherwise paperless horses, and for the small number of horses offered or represented fraudulently, dentition remains an indispensable--though somewhat flawed--tool in establishing age. So the next time you find yourself looking a horse in the mouth to determine his age, be cautious before you pronounce him young and robust or elderly and infirm. You could be reading the indicators absolutely accurately--or, like the experts in the studies, you could be fooled by the testimony of the teeth.

Galvayne's legacy
Several British publications in the 19th century, including one as early as 1818, dealt with the subject of aging horses by their teeth. But it wasn't until Sydney Galvayne traveled throughout Europe in the 1880s, making a living by aging horses at sales and selling his secret to others, that the practice gained wide currency.

Galvayne claimed that he could tell the exact age of any horse brought to him. His book, Horse Dentition: Showing How to Tell Exactly the Age of a Horse up to Thirty Years, published in Glasgow around 1885, cites his numerous triumphs in the face of public skepticism. This account of a demonstration at a London riding school is typical:

The next animal was a bay mare. "Thirteen years," said I.
"Correct," said the owner, "but how do you do it?"
"You pay my fee, and you will know all about it," was my reply.
They then produced a gray. "Three years older than the last one," I quietly observed. "Sixteen years old."
"Right again, but how the deuce do you do it?" was the owner's remark.
I replied, "It's quite easy when you know how."

Galvayne's confident explication of age-linked changes in equine dentition and his claim of infallibility for his method caused considerable anxiety among crooked horse dealers. These shady characters soon developed fraudulent means for outwitting buyers who had read Galvayne's treatise. One such deception, called "bishoping" (after a well-known practitioner of the art), involved drilling new cups in aged incisors, then burning or dying these artificial infundibulums to resemble the dark cups found in more youthful mouths. At the other extreme, a too-young horse might have his baby teeth pulled to make him look six months to a year older.

In establishing his reputation, Galvayne had the advantage of dealing with a large population of horses kept under similar environmental and management conditions. The teeth of horses kept stabled and fed the same kinds of feed are apt to wear in consistent patterns. Soon widely accepted in Europe, Galvayne's system went on to become the basis for aging techniques taught in veterinary colleges around the world. His ideas are still found in a standard veterinary reference, The Official Guide to Determining the Age of a Horse, published in 1966 by the American Association of Equine Practitioners. The book is illustrated with photographs of teeth that match Galvayne's descriptions, but because the examples came from slaughterhouse skulls, there is no way of corroborating that the dental configurations are from horses who actually fit the ages specified.

Quantifying the evidence
Though veterinarians and other professionals grumbled over the years that Galvayne's aging formulas didn't seem to apply 100 percent to all horses, anecdotal objections did little to shake the faith most horsemen had in the technique. Then, in 1994, J.P. Walmsley, a British veterinarian, examined the teeth of a number of registered Thoroughbred horses between five and seven years of age and discovered a greater deviation from Galvayne's dental patterns than he had expected. For example, some of the five-year-olds had the teeth of a four-year-old, while others had mouths that would pass for eight.

The following year, six British researchers did another dental study, in which a number of experienced equine practitioners were asked to age horses--all registered and thus of known age--on the basis of their teeth alone. Results showed that with immature horses (age five and under), dental growth patterns differed enough from the expected to cause the experts to err in their estimates by as much as two years and nine months. Mature horses between five and 10 years of age were even more likely to be misjudged: Eight- and 10-year-olds were estimated by some experienced clinicians to be between 13 and 15; one six-year-old was judged by one veterinarian to be 12; two eight-year-olds were pegged at 15 by several veterinarians. Some much older horses, on the other hand, passed for mere youths: A 17-year-old was judged to be nine by one practitioner, and a 15-year-old was aged as seven by another.

One reason for the uncertainty in aging came to light in 1996, when three Belgian researchers examined the teeth of 570 horses representing several different types of horses--Arabians, Belgian draft horses and trotters. All were registered and of known ages, ranging from two to 25 years. The researchers found that the rate of dental wear was markedly different for each of the breeds--slower in Arabs, faster in the draft horses, somewhere in between in the trotters. Tooth composition and enamel hardness, both heritable traits, made the horses "age" at different rates. The study concluded that accurate aging by dentition has to be based on breed-specific guidelines.

The perils of prediction
Jack Easley, DVM, an equine practitioner in Shelbyville, Kentucky, who writes and lectures widely on equine dentistry, agrees that aging horses using Galvayne's formula is, at best, an educated guess and hardly the exact science that we have been led to believe it is.

"Horsemen of all types, veterinarians included, have perpetuated these theories, generation after generation, just because it was the way it was always done and it was what they were taught in school," Easley says. "You can certainly estimate whether the horse is within a certain age range by looking at his teeth, but in general, aging horses by studying their incisors is difficult and inaccurate." He believes that veterinarians and horsemen should take the recent research as an opportunity to reassess established practices.

Breed differences, such as those outlined in the Belgian study, are but one reason for the inaccuracies, Easley says. Individual rates of tooth emergence and wear account for other aging errors. The sequence of dental maturation takes horses from toothlessness at birth to a complete set of 36 full-size permanent teeth by age five--give or take some months. At predictable intervals, starting at day six, 24 temporary "milk" teeth erupt from the gums and are later shed, to be replaced by larger, more durable permanent teeth. (Because only geldings and stallions usually grow canine teeth--also called "tushes"--and both sexes may display the vestigial premolars known as "wolf teeth," the count of permanent teeth ranges between 36 and 42.)

When a horseman pulls back the lips of an immature animal and examines the incisors, he's checking the number of temporary and permanent teeth in the lineup as an indication of the youngster's age. But just as with human children, immature horses produce and shed milk teeth and acquire permanent replacements following roughly, but not precisely, the same schedule. Unlike human teeth, which stop growing once fully emerged, equine permanent teeth continue to erupt throughout the horse's life: As chewing wears away the surface tooth, new tooth material emerges from beneath the gum to replace it.

Easley also believes that the influence of management factors on the wear patterns of horse teeth has been overlooked in standard aging guides. Horses on pasture, for example, are constantly using their incisors to crop off grasses. The abrasiveness of forage varies with the amount of silicates (silica-based minerals) it contains, and grazers' incisors wear faster or slower depending upon forage type and the amount of their grazing. Additionally, horses who live in areas with sandy soil may wear their incisors more rapidly and give the appearance of being older than horses of the same chronological age who live on other soils.

Stall-kept horses, who use their front teeth primarily to pull hay from a net or rack, usually show less wear of the incisors than pastured horses. Feeding from a hayrack rather than from the ground also contributes to a more youthful mouth, Easley says, because the horse does not lower his head and stretch his neck when eating. This means that the normal change of the incisors' profile angle to a more forward slant is slowed.

In horses who suffer from abnormality in the way their teeth come together (malocclusion) or deformities such as overbite ("parrot mouth"), corrective dental care can play havoc with aging techniques by filing away all of the markings associated with age. But if malocclusions, broken teeth or other dental abnormalities are left untended, they produce irregular wear that can also confuse aging: For instance, a horse may give the appearance of being six years old on one side of his mouth and nine on the other. Mineral deficiencies are another cause of abnormal patterns in the teeth and can lead to errors in aging. Finally, horses who crib or run their teeth along stall bars may smooth the normal pattern of their incisors prematurely, making themselves appear older than they really are.

For almost a century, Galvayne's system of matching dental features to specific ages provided experts with a measure of certainty. We now know that this system is more of a guideline than a blueprint. Discovering that the master plan is inaccurate, even by a few degrees, can cause the builder-or the horseman--some unease. But it doesn't mean that the plan must be discarded. After all, it is not really surprising that individual horses grow, shed and replace their teeth on varying schedules, or that tooth wear varies among horses, depending on breed and environment. As long as you make allowances for some dental "dishonesty" when you look to a horse's mouth for an accounting of his years, you'll come away with some useful information. "This is the only way we have of aging horses," says Easley, "and while it may not be a very accurate method, it can still usually tell us if a horse is young, middle-aged or old, and it is still a valid thing to do."

Charting dental change

The permanent teeth of horses are called hypsodont, meaning that they have short roots (about three-quarters of an inch) and long crowns (as much as 41/2 inches in unworn teeth). Contained mostly within the gums at first, the crowns erupt at a rate of about one-eighth inch each year. This is enough to accommodate average wear and allow the upper and lower incisors to maintain contact--despite a lifetime of nipping and chewing--unless the lifetime exceeds 30 years, in which case the horse can actually use up his teeth. Sydney Galvayne based his famous aging system on the effect ordinary wear has in exposing successive levels of incisor material in horses after age five (the age when a horse has all his permanent teeth). The following alterations in appearance are the key indicators of increasing age.

* The cement-lined enamel cup (infundibulum) on the biting (occiusal) surface of each incisor wears away in early maturity. The concave cups disappear on the central lower incisors at about age six, on the intermediate incisors at age seven, and on the corner incisors at age eight. Because the cups on the upper incisors are deeper, they take longer to disappear, but they are generally gone by the time a horse is 10 or 11. After the bottom of the back edge of the cup disappears (about age 15), the surface of each incisor is marked by a small, round enamel spot.
* Yellow-brown dental stars appear between ages eight and 10, as the upper portion of the tooth is worn away. They are actually the pulp cavity, which has been filled in with secondary dentin as the tooth has matured. These stars" start out as dark lines in the center of the tooth, then change to more star-like ovals at about age 13, and finally become round at about age 15. In elderly horses, the occlusal surface is worn smooth and patternless.
* As the horse ages, the shape of the incisors' occlusal surfaces alters from narrow oval to roundish to triangular, eventually becoming longer from front to back than side to side.
* The profile of the upper and lower arcades progresses from nearly upright in young horses to a forward slant in the elderly.

Galvayne relied on two other dental features to determine the age of mature horses. One is a hook that is supposed to appear on the outer edge of each upper corner incisor at seven, disappear at age eight and return age 11. The second is the yellow-brown groove called Galvayne's groove, said to appear at the gum line of the upper corner incisor at age 10 and lengthen as the horse ages, spanning the entire tooth by age 20, then leaving the gum line and advancing toward the bottom of the tooth until it wears out by age 30. A 1996 Belgian research study found that hooks apparent in only two of the 15 seven-year-old horses, and in both cases they appeared one side of the mouth only. As for the famous groove, Belgian researchers found no consistency in the size, length or even existence of the trait in horses of the

[Rienzi]

If the markings on the horse don't fit, it may well be a completely different animal.
Myself, I just look at the angle that the teeth come together to get a rough idea of age.

Sounds like it's a great thing that you and this horse have found eachother.

[cloudyandcallie]

Without the TB tattoos, it is hard to tell ages, since so many horses are sold with years knocked of off their ages.

I bought an ottb mare whose looked and acted much younger than her age, and later on in years she did not exhibit the Galvayne's groove that is supposed to develop and then disappear. But her tattoo told me her age and altho she was sometimes thought to be a filly in her old age, Callie (Kick and Howl) was the age of her tattoo.

Good of you to rescue the horse. I hope it lives a good long life.

[goeslikestink]

I don't care about the papers. I saved the horse without knowing one thing about it except she needed some TLC and a home. I would think it is very exciting that she might be a tad younger than represented just so we could have more time together. I am in love with her! :D

i always go by teeth as birthdays can be human made or natural ie normal herd is in spring humans make made man foals ie if a tb 1st jan is his birthday but the foal might not be a year old so teeth for me

[Seven-up]

When my jr. hunter got her measurement card, they went by her teeth since I never had posession of her papers. It always bugged me because they made her a year older than what her tattoo said, and what her registered name/birthday was.


Teeth aren't exact, but papers can be faked. So it's a toss-up.

[Gayla]

When my jr. hunter got her measurement card, they went by her teeth since I never had posession of her papers. It always bugged me because they made her a year older than what her tattoo said, and what her registered name/birthday was.


Teeth aren't exact, but papers can be faked. So it's a toss-up.

But they did come within a year of her age. I think they did a good job. But in your case I think should have seen how close they were to her tattoo age and gone with that. But they probably didn't even know that did they?

[ponyjumper4]

Teeth really are not reliable because if the horse's teeth haven't been cared for, it can make them look older than they are. The opposite can be true as well. For kicks I had my vet guess my mare's age. She looked at her body condition and guessed 10. Was floored when I told her she was 16. She immediately looked at her teeth and said she still would have guessed 10 because her teeth didn't look that old. She asked me if I had papers on her, which I did. Since I had owned the mare for 10 years at that time, I told her there was no way she was 10.

[Seven-up]

But they did come within a year of her age. I think they did a good job. But in your case I think should have seen how close they were to her tattoo age and gone with that. But they probably didn't even know that did they?


I think I was so annoyed because here they are, flipping her lip up to look at her teeth, why not just read the tattoo? But yes, they were close. I guess tattoos aren't really reliable either.