Gutted - ponies teeth are terminal

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Polos Mum

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Pony struggled with weight this winter from what I thought was a known tooth issue. Dentist out today and while the broken teethares the same where he's over used the teeth on the other side they have completely disintegrated, there are just shells left and nothing can be done to fix them.
Poor pony has no way to grind anything in the back of his mouth so we're on a downhill sprial.

Dentist suggested stocking up on grass nuts/ ready grass type stuff so I can feed him grass soup over winter but it might not be enough.

Recommendations for grass nuts welcome - but really this is just a moan from me - so sad for such a nice pony. All down to lack of proper dentistry when he was younger.
 
Really sorry to hear your story. Try contacting simple systems - they do a variety of feeds that are fed soaked and could be suitable. They were very helpful when I contacted them.

I had an old pony years ago that could no longer chew and she kept going on soaked food for a while.
 
sorry to hear your news. there is an old pony on our yard with only a couple of teeth left and she is fed grass nuts. she is doing great.

at least he found you and has been looked after properly now. good luck with him. I had to feed mine grass nuts for a while due to previous neglect and he slobbered them all over the place...terrible table manners!
 
Thank you - I will do that, it is really mushy/ soup like? Dentist said even the rolled oats he'd been having would have been mostly passing straight through as he wouldn't have been able to grind them at all.

He looks so good on grass at the moment I had no idea they would be that bad
 
You can make it as soupy as you like! They do make a mess with it though!! You can feed lots of it - it is forage based. It soaks up to make a much larger volume than a scoop of the nuts. My mare came in during the day to have it last year as it took her quite a while to eat the amount she had.
 
Hes a lucky pony to be with you. google ring and ask everywhere whats out there. You may just be surprized by your ponys way of adapting and coping. but he is a lucky pony to have a good mum who cares x
 
When my 31 year old had the dentist out in 2008, he only had 3 working teeth left. I suspected he would die shortly thereafter as trying to feed enough feed to him at so many regular intervals every single day might prove untenable. However he is now 36 years old and those 3 teeth are still there working to a greater or lesser extent and most importantly he is still alive 5 years later and still looking fantastic! He does absolutely fine when the grass is through so summer is a breeze. In winter we have thick snow on the ground for months on end and I feed him soft light hay which he seems to manage fine. He sucks a lot of it and spits out the stalks. I feed him a soft pellet balancer feed twice a day (only about 4lbs each feed) and over winter he thrives :)

This is him, photo taken last summer, 2012. By the way the little pony in the picture with him was 40 years old.

June52012005.jpg


And him in summer 2010.

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So as you can see, he does just fine each year :)
 
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Sorry to hear about your pony x. Would fast fibre be any good? When my old mare had a broken tooth I put her on this and she would happily slurp through a large tubtrug each night, she kept her weight on and enjoyed it :)
 
We fed soaked grass nuts,,speedibeet and grazeon to our old ladies and it worked well to keep weight on. We made it into soup for those with teeth that showed their age. We fed it virtually as a hay replacer, over night in winter. Good luck with him :)
 
Hi Polosmum

My friend is going through a similar thing with her 26YO mare at the moment. She isn't able to chew long stem fibre like or hay or haylage any more due to a "smooth mouth". She can manage medium length grass though and is doing well at the moment. Come winter, friend has invested in an automatic feeding machine. You fill it with feed (grass nuts or some soaked fibre type feed, set the timer and it will release the feed 4 - 6 times during the day or night, that way they don't eat it all in one go and stand there hungry for the rest of the day/night and mimics a trickle feeding approach as much as poss. Might be worth a look into. Good Luck.
 
My friend has a 32 year old pony with no teeth, she just feeds her mushy foods such as sugarbeet, fast fibre and soaked conditioning cubes. She's started her on micronised linseed recently too.

She looks really well :)
 
Wow Springfeather your pony is simply amazing. I would never guess the age! I have a 23 year old with a split tooth and I have to manually extract feed from between the tooth and his gum daily. I feed the Allen & Page range of feeds - like Calm & Condition or the veteran one and they all soak to a soft mush. It's doable, just be careful with the hay - I think the soft stuff is fine, but a friend's pony with few teeth was pts with impaction colic through not chewing the hay.
 
Thanks all, really encouraging to know there are some sucess stories. When you get bad news it's hard to see past it sometimes.

SF your oldie looks great. The sad thing is this boy's only 20 so no age really.

Where is best place for grass nuts in bulk as dentist mentioned they get scarce in late winter so worth buying a pallet load?
 
Polos Mum said:
Thanks all, really encouraging to know there are some sucess stories. When you get bad news it's hard to see past it sometimes.
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It is. I felt the same when I first heard. You think you'll never be able to feed them enough to keep them alive or that the job of feeding them will be too difficult and time consuming, but once you have a plan in action it's actually not that difficult at all. Finding the right feed that works for each animal is the key though. I don't have to feed my old boy wet feed as I use a pelleted balancer feed which pretty much dissolves in his mouth so I don't even have to contend with the sloppy feed which would be very difficult to do during the freezing winters we have here. Soaked sugar beet could help your boy and soft nuts of some description. I'm sorry I don't know what grass nuts are but if they can be mushed down then they sound like they would work. Every year my old boy thrills me that he has survived another year; he's a grand old lad and although I worry a little about him I know that when it does come his time to die, it won't be through lack of suitable feed. You just need to find what works for your boy :)
 
Ready mash was a gods send when we had are old girl, she was in her 40's when we had to have her PTS she never had a tooth in her mouth.. she was kepted on Ready Mash Extra x x
 
I've got a 30 year old and her son who's 22, they both have tooth issues, I kept my mare going on norther crop dryers grass nuts, soaked to a crumbly mixture, she doest like them too wet, to this I add soaked sugar beet, a good two scoops (2 llb feed scoop) when dry and make sure it's well soaked, also added veteran vitality / conditioning cubes soaked to a soft wet mix. She can't eat any hay at all but I use a chaff cutter to make my hay into chaff and mix with the set feed. She ends up with a 120litre tub full over night which usually has all gone by morning. She looked ok at the end of the winter, but sadly has started to look really old the last month or so , I've made the decision to not put her through another winter but will be doing the same feed routine for her 22 year old so. For the comming winter, the can and do survive on forage based feeds as hay replacers, but it's not cheap, they're worth it though after all the years I've had them.
 
Polos Mum said:
:(
Pony struggled with weight this winter from what I thought was a known tooth issue. Dentist out today and while the broken teethares the same where he's over used the teeth on the other side they have completely disintegrated, there are just shells left and nothing can be done to fix them.
Poor pony has no way to grind anything in the back of his mouth so we're on a downhill sprial.

Dentist suggested stocking up on grass nuts/ ready grass type stuff so I can feed him grass soup over winter but it might not be enough.

Recommendations for grass nuts welcome - but really this is just a moan from me - so sad for such a nice pony. All down to lack of proper dentistry when he was younger.
Click to expand...

Or more poor feeding. I had an 11 year break from horse ownership and I a mortified at the lack of knowledge in general, over feeding of sugary concentrate (or to be honest, any concentrate), and lack of general knowledge about how to do anything with horses whatsover. I despair.
 
My old boy was 36 yrs old with no back teeth. He was a poor doer anyway so to keep his weight on he had
Rowan Barbury Fibre Mash
Grass nuts soaked
Sugarbeet soaked with conditioning cubes
Large tub trug of Leigh senior chop or Hifi Senior

Look on the Rowan Barbary website there food is great and they do different types. When my boy dropped more weight he went onto Rowan Barbury extra mash packed with oils and vitamins. Up until the day he was PTS he looked amazing. Also look on the Veteran Horse Society website for information especially to make up the hay replacer in a tub which is fibre cubes, speedibeet and chop soaked with water in a large tub. I still have a 36 yrs old pony with hardly any front teeth but hes a laminitic so he gets
Fibre beet
Speedibeet
Leigh senior shop or Hifi senior in a big tub. The VHS website is good though you can ask them for advice
 
A friend had a horse who lost her teeth in old age. She did really well on soaked grass nuts & soaked conditioning cubes. She also had large trugs of readi-grass instead of hay ( shorter & easier to breakdown)
She didn't make the feeds as soup just a mash consistency, we were all surprised at how well the horse did but I guess the jaws are strong enough to chew certain stuff using just the gums.
 
Sorry to hear about your pony. I have a 28 year old who has been banned from hay for years, she just chews and spits out a ball. Shes been eating Simple System feed for a few winters now, she has a couple of huge trugs per day. Purabeet, LucieNuts and i may try some grass nuts this year (shes laminitic). She looks amazing this year, will upload a pic later. Had the EDT out this week and he effectively condemed her remaining teeth, missing, loose and what remains are all over the plan. Quite shocking to hear though we knew they were bad. Shes so youthful on the outside you'd never guess! Anyway where theres a will and all that. Plenty of sloppy foods out there to try, will look forward to an update.
 
I've known lots of ponies with this problem and they can usually be maintained quite well using mash type or fine chop hay replacers, although it does work out quite a bit more expensive than feeding hay. Grass nuts are great if pony is not laminitic, they are usually high calorie and obviously similar to the pony's summer diet of grass. They are usually not too expensive either.

I would be cautious of feeding too much of alfalfa based products though as problems such as excessive urination have been reported when some types of alfalfa have been fed as the main hay replacer.
 
Some really good suggestions to experiment with here so thank you all. I'm feeling a bit more positive this morning, we have loads of space so I'll use more of the fields over winter so keep him eating grass as long as possible.
He's never had lami problems (hence he's such a perfect companion for my big horses) so I can give most things a try.

He's so easy to keep all the rest of the year a few hundred over winter isn't much really, especially when I sell the hay I've kept for him!
 
Already great advice given. As a side note on oats, if you pour boiling water over and let steep they will come out mushy and gooey. Much easier to digest.

Terri
 
You could also go for something like fast fiber and vetran vitality as both need added water and become a soft food when soaked. They only take a minute to soak and taste and smell good. We used both on with an underweight mare and had great results.
 
Equilibrium Ireland said:
Already great advice given. As a side note on oats, if you pour boiling water over and let steep they will come out mushy and gooey. Much easier to digest.

Terri
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Second this - a friend kept her old mare on soaked grass nuts and porridge (boiled rolled oats) for many years and she looked great at 32 when I last saw her.
 
I think it depends on ponies weight and how much you plan on feeding as to what you choose. Something like fast fibre is pretty low energy and could be fed in larger amounts as a hay replacer but I wouldn't want to do the same with grass nuts if it was mine (as he is a bit of a rotund fellow). Definitely lots of soakable options now though.
 
another vote for fast Fibre. My friend kept her old Exmoor pony on it for the last 2 years she had him (he was 41 when he died) he had a big trugful overnight soaked to a nice sloppy mess and during the day was able to nibble on the longer grass. He actually improved condition wise once he was on this regime and looked really well. He was PTS when he started to fall over in the field and couldn't get up unaided, but he looked fab right to the end.
 
I took on an old pony last year - who looked like this.



Hes about 35, had never seen a dentist EVER :( Many of his teeth just crumbled and fell out as he was being examined.

A year later he looks like this :D



He only has a couple of molars left, so cant chew hay/haylage. He manages ok with grass as long as its not too short.
He has 2 trugs a day of speedibeet or fibre beet , hi fibre cubes, and benevit supplement.

In the winter he will be basically be given constant access to hay replacers in his stable which he can wander in and out of as he likes.
It can be done :D
 
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