About GG-EDT / Why choose GG-EDT?

GG-EDT is an Equine Dental Practice set up in 2007 by horse enthusiast Gary Wilson who has a desire to provide dental services to your horse using considerate methods and in the majority of cases, without the need for expensive (and often unnecessary) sedation and/or power tools.

So what is meant by considerate methods and why is that important to you and your horse? Our considerate methods are about treating your horse as an individual and with respect, working with care and consideration around his or her mouth, ensuring that we work with your horse to provide the best possible experience to the animal, which will mean better tolerance of future work.

Too often, people work with horses in a manner that is either impatient of the horse's reaction, or is geared to simply getting through too many horses in too short a time - either of which can give a horse a bad experience making them less tolerant and in extreme cases contributing to ongoing behavioural problems with the animal.

This is why so many people resort to giving sedation to horses to work with them, or choose to use power tools to make their job quicker and easier (which in the majority of cases require the horse to be sedated because of the noise and vibration generated by these tools)

But are these practices really necessary or beneficial to the horse? We believe in a lot of cases, no. These drugs and practices are being applied to horses to make people's lives easier, but not necessarily the horses, adding costs to the owner and risks to the animal. Of course, sedation has its place in equine dental treatment, such as when performing major extractions of teeth, or for the very small number of animals who are so fractious, that applying treatment without sedation is dangerous all round, but these cases are very much in the minority.

In the vast majority of cases, all corrective work is done manually with extremely high quality, custom designed instrumentation made of medical grade stainless steel. Not only does this ensure cleanliness, it also means only the correct amount of material is removed from your horse's teeth. Again, there is temptation for people to make their own lives easier by using power tools to reduce teeth quicker, but these tools can all too easily remove too much material in seconds, essentially destroying the horse's ability to chew effectively in those areas. This damage can take weeks or months to grow out in a lot of horses, and in older horses may never grow out due to the reduced rate of eruption of older horse's teeth.

There are a number of other potential risks with power tools; they create a lot of noise and vibration, which is upsetting for most horses, meaning they need sedating to use these tools. The sheer size of the heads of these tools makes them clumsy to handle, increasing the risk of removing too much material, or removing material from adjacent teeth. There is also an increased risk of slipping and causing damage to the soft tissues of the tongue, gums or soft palate. These tools also generate a lot of heat as they work, yet very few such tools use water cooling - in humans, dental research shows that if a tooth is heated to just 16.5 degrees C above ambient temperature, the pulp inside the tooth starts dying, which means the tooth dies. There is no such research available for horses, but as the basic components are the same (enamel, dentine, pulp), it seems reasonable to conclude a similar issue could be happening in horses, which is particularly a concern for the treatment of young horses, where the pulp is closer to the chewing surface than in older horses.

Because our whole ethos is about care for your horse, honesty between us and you is paramount - we will always tell you exactly what we think about your horse's dental condition, and will often involve you in the diagnosis if you so desire, meaning you will know exactly where you stand from the outset and what to expect. If your horse needs no treatment, we will tell you so - we do not believe in performing unnecessary work on any animal at any time. And if your horse needs no treatment, we won't charge you for having a look either, because if we do no real work, why should you pay?

Hand in hand with honesty is openness - if you have any questions about your horse, the diagnosis, the treatment or anything else, just ask! If you want to have a feel in your horse's mouth to help you understand what is being said, just ask - as long as it's safe to do so, we have no issue in letting you feel! If you want to give feedback to improve the service, please do!

But we're not just about dentistry! We're also about education! If your horse has a specific problem, we will advise you on the correct feeding and bitting in order to get the most from your horse. If there is anything you can do to help relieve the issue, we will advise you appropriately of this too. We will also be working with the local equine community, providing mini-talks to new horse owners or any other interested parties - if you are organising an event and would like a small talk to be given about equine dentistry, get in touch with us!

Self education is also important - this means that we are constantly learning, researching and writing papers on dentistry, sharing our findings with the equine dental and veterinary community - we believe that by always learning and always sharing our information, we help educate others, whilst always learning from others too in order to keep the service the best is can possibly be. We also strive to have completely transparent and close working relationships with local vets in order to bring about a total service to you.

We're also about choice. Just because we have strong opinions about only using sedatives where absolutely necessary, and from refraining from using power tools in all but a very few extreme cases, you might think we are saying those who do use these methods are wrong. This is not the case - we do not condemn any other methods, unless their usage is causing obvious harm or extreme stress to the animals involved - we simply believe there are other ways to dispense effective equine dental treatment. We offer a slightly different service to most others, but ultimately, you, the owner can choose which way of working is better for you and your horse, and we respect your decision.

Of course, words are the easy part, but we also relish the opportunity to put our beliefs into practice, so if you want to give us a go, we would be delighted to book you in and come to see your horses - we don't think you'll be disappointed.

If you have any questions at all, please drop us an email, or call us. The details are on the home/contact page using the link above

We look forward to hearing from you.

Gary Wilson, Founder GG-EDT