25/08/2026
How your horse's diet shapes their dental health
Digestion starts in the mouth. Your horse's teeth are the first step in breaking down feed, and good digestion depends on them working well.
Horses evolved as grazers, shifting over millions of years from soft woodland plants to tough, abrasive grasses loaded with silica and often coated in fine soil. To cope, they developed hypsodont, or "high-crowned", teeth: long teeth with a large reserve buried in the jaw that erupts throughout life to replace what wears away, at around 2 to 4 mm a year.
Each tooth has a soft pulp core surrounded by dentine, then enamel (the hardest tissue in the body) and cementum on the outside. Enamel is hard but brittle, so it relies on the dentine and cementum for support. These layers wear at different rates, creating the ridged surface a horse needs to grind fibre.
Teeth form layer by layer during the first few years of life, mostly while still hidden in the jaw. Building strong, well-mineralised enamel requires minerals, mainly calcium and phosphorus in the right balance, plus vitamin D and magnesium.
From there, a horse's teeth tend to reflect the circumstances it grazes in. A youngster raised on nothing but mineral-poor pasture can end up with chalky, brittle teeth. Bore water high in fluoride mottles the enamel and leaves it prone to fracture. Bare, dusty paddocks force horses to graze low and swallow sand and grit, which sharply accelerates wear. Pastures dominated by high-silica grasses, such as Parramatta grass, wear the teeth down even faster.
What a horse eats also shapes how the jaw moves. Long-stem roughage produces a broad, sweeping side-to-side stroke that wears the whole grinding surface and keeps saliva flowing, which lubricates the feed and buffers stomach acid. Because a horse produces saliva only while grinding, hard feed and pellets, which shorten that stroke, mean less saliva and less protection for the gut.
Every horse’s mouth develops sharp edges and overgrowths over time, regardless of diet. The upper jaw is wider than the lower, and the cheek teeth meet at a 10- to 15-degree angle. As a result, the outer edge of the upper teeth and the inner edge of the lower teeth do not fully wear, and points form there.
Left unchecked, sharp points and uneven wear will begin to restrict jaw movement. As a result, the jaw grinds less effectively, produces less saliva, and passes larger, poorly broken-down particles into the gut.
Balanced minerals, especially through the growing years, plenty of forage, and regular dental care are the foundation of a mouth that will serve your horse for life.
By Marieke Raines (Equine dental technician)
