Humans have to perform fairly regular oral hygiene in order to keep their teeth healthy throughout their lives, but animals can’t visit the dentist. What do they do that allow them to keep their teeth? Or do they have dental problems the same as humans would?
Animals don’t consume nearly as much sugar as we do, for one, so they don’t develop the same kind of sugar-related maladies as we do. There’s also the simple fact that most animals don’t live nearly as long as humans do, so it’s more likely that the rest of their bodies will give out before their teeth do.
Anecdotally, my 9-year-old cat is in fact missing two of his front teeth, and has been for years.
Rodents and other species have teeth that continually grow, worn down by gnawing. Sharks constantly have new sets of their teeth growing in.
They don’t. Losing teeth is a significant contributory cause of death in older wild animals that depend on their teeth .
Pets’ teeth must be cleaned by you or your veterinarian. I could not possibly get my cats to stay still for that. Once a year the vet scrapes their gums to remove as much tartar as possible considering they are not compliant patients. One year the vet was considering putting Wilson under as he was putting up such a ruckus.
This. In my Anthropology 101 course, one of the first things they mentioned is that human hunter-gatherers don’t get dental cavities at anything even close to the frequency that humans of a more modern lifestyle do. And it’s not just sugar, but bread and its near relatives, too.
Yeah, but what about gingivitis?
Horses’ teeth continuously grow, pushing through the gums over an average 20-30 year period. Because wear can be uneven and cause sharp and painful points to form on some teeth and similar malformations, horses routinely have their teeth “floated” (why it’s called that is beyond me; they’re actually filing them) by an equine dentist about every 2 years. When a horse becomes suddenly cranky about the bit, drops and/or can’t maintain weight, and/or has sudden behavioral changes, one of the first things to check is their teeth.
People in non-developed or what many would call ‘primitive’ societies get some dental cavities (caries) and some degree of gingivitis but it is correct that it is much more rare than in modern Western societies and generally less severe. One of the worst times in history for dental health was after the widespread introduction of sugar but BEFORE good modern dentistry and preventative measures like fluoride. That is a great recipe for the worst case of rot-mouth that you ever saw and that really did happen even well into the 20th century. Many people simply watched their teeth decay one by one and then pulled them until they didn’t have any left. They used dentures (that have been around in some form for a very long time) after that.
That isn’t the way it has to be however and was not throughout most of human history. One of the best classes I took in college was an Anthropology course called Bones, Bodies and Disease taught by a world-renowned expert on mummies. The class had a specially built classroom just for it that contained bones and other body parts from people all around the world. We had to learn to identify small clues about health and general culture based on individual specimens and we spent a lot of time on teeth in particular. The vast majority of the specimens ranging from the Incans to ancient Egyptians had very good dental health in general.
The biggest reason, as noted, was because they didn’t have much if any refined sugar in their diet. The other reason was that their diet contained some grit that constantly polished small caries from their tooth surfaces. If they were older (40’s or above), you would generally see lots of wear from the cumulative effect of all the abrasion but hardly any deep decay. You can see the same thing in isolated tribes ranging from Africa to South America today. They generally have bright white teeth with little decay.
The same thing is true with animals. It is perfectly possible for them to get dental decay or infections that can impair or kill them but it isn’t normal overall. For example, wolves are essentially the same species as domesticated dogs but wolves generally have healthy teeth because they depend on them to hunt their natural diet. Domesticated dogs get the same dental problems that people do if you feed them people food. If you have a dog with really bad breath, that is the likely cause and it isn’t healthy.
Another factor may be that with dogs at least, their teeth aren’t firmly pressed up against each other. Each of my dogs’ teeth is free and clear of its neighbors, but normal human teeth are so close to each other, we have to floss to help prevent decay between them.
Here is a good short article about dental health in ancient humans and how it was generally better than that of people today (at least without lots of intervention and expense). I know the original question was about animals but I think it was posed backwards (that isn’t a criticism - I wondered the same thing before). It is based on the assumption that bad dental health is inevitable without constant and deliberate maintenance but that isn’t true in general. It isn’t that most animals generally have self-maintaining teeth - that is normal. It is that modern people have changed our dietary patterns so much that it causes extreme dental decay without intervention.
Animals including humans that live with the diet they were designed for do not have nearly as many dental problems even without any brushing, flossing or anything else.
Still, there were and are a few ancient or primitive societies that found ways to keep their teeth extra healthy by ‘brushing’ with native plants or whatever else they had available. Some animals engage in versions of the same behavior.For example, these people in ancient Sudan found a way to maintain a Tom Cruise level smile just by cleaning their teeth with a common weed.
How was income level/status equated to the health of peoples teeth and bones?
It wasn’t in general unlike today with one big exception. For ancient and/or primitive societies, everyone ate the same general type of diet and dental health was almost universally good. A very small percentage (usually about 1%) had some dental issues like a cavity or a missing tooth but that was mostly the luck of the draw.
The big exception came in Western Europe during the late Middle Ages. Refined sugar products started to become available but they were expensive and mostly consumed by the upper classes. The people that could afford them saw a sharp downward spiral in their dental health. That is the time when the peasants who still lived with their traditional and non sugar-laden diet still had better teeth than their much wealthier overlords. As refined sugar became consistently available to the masses over the next few hundred years, almost everyone living in those societies started to have dental problems. That was the dark period of dental health and didn’t start to become reversed until modern dentistry and preventive products became widespread in the 20th century.
I presume the wealthy people had their bad teeth removed?
If you haven’t read guns germs and steel you would probably like the book…
Here is an article on dental health in the Middle Ages. It notes that it was still mostly good for the masses because they couldn’t afford much sugar that was just starting to come in from foreign lands. However, that was also the time when the wealthy and nobility were cranking up their conquest machines to introduce their new trade finds. They could afford new and exotic sugar laden foods and that works out exactly the same way that a kid that inherits a candy store but no toothbrush does today.
Are their significant differences in rates of cancer and other diseases between now and then? Disease which we think are largely (or possibly) made more common by our modern diet and other things like that in our modern world?
I own Guns, Germs and Steel. I haven’t read it in a few years but I probably should again. It is an excellent book.
Wealthy and poor people have always had bad teeth removed and had preferred techniques for it that vary by culture. Ancient and/or primitive societies were often very sophisticated when it came to health procedures even if they didn’t know the science behind why it worked. In the class I mentioned above, the professor is one of the world’s best experts on trepanning. That is literally ancient brain surgery. We had skulls that had the procedure performed and the surgical expertise needed to cut precise holes in the skull is impressive. Not all of the patients survived it but most of them did (you can tell based on the healing pattern of the skull). Pulling teeth is trivial in comparison.
I am going to have to bow out of that one because it is a controversial topic and I am not an expert on it. The massive increase in diabetes and weight related disorders are almost universally acknowledged to also be caused by a modern Western diet but I don’t know enough to debate anyone well for some of the other possibilities.
Ah, ok, thats good. Better to be honest and than make up an answer… BTW… you never answered me about the SEC. Do most people from Tulane cheer for LSU?
I do because my little brother graduated from LSU but in general, no. LSU is supposed to be Tulane’s key football rival but they tend to destroy Tulane every time they play. I keep telling my little brother that having strict academic standards like Tulane does makes it hard to field a really good football team. LSU seems to have found a way around that problem.