Do they not have cavities all over the place ?
In: Biology
1. They absolutely do get teeth problems, and often die from them. What makes you think this doesn’t happen?
2. Their diets aren’t as high in sugar and acidic drinks as a modern human in a developed country.
Most wild animals do not live long enough to get serious teeth issues. Domestic animals live twice as long as their wild counterparts and indoor animals live three to four times as long as wild ones. So wild animals do not usually live long enough to get issues with their teeth because of things like infections, fights, accidents, malnutrition, and other issues.
But even the wild animals that do live long enough to have issues with their teeth will usually not live for long. They are less likely to eat properly with a tooth ache and often make the infection worse. So their health tends to deteriorate and they often end up dying. So you do not see many wild animals with missing teeth as they usually die before it gets that bad.
Yes, animals do have cavities and teeth problems their entire lives.
However, they still have fewer teeth issues than humans because they don’t eat excessive amounts of sugary and acidic foods, which damage teeth far more than other things.
1. Many natural diets are high in tough crunchy material and low in sugars and fats, which means less sticks to your teeth for bacteria to eat, and food naturally scrapes some of it off.
2. Some animals die of old age before their teeth can become a problem for them, some can replace their teeth. Humans do this too, we replace our teeth once in our lives, and that gives us healthy teeth up until we are just about past our prime reproductive years with a more natural diet, at which point our aging body makes survival very hard in many ways, not just because of our teeth.
3. Animals can and do get tooth problems, and very frequently it kills them. Broken or worn down teeth often mean an animal starves from being unable to hunt or feed properly, an infected tooth very quickly becomes lethal.
No sugary drinks and chocolate bars for second breakfast … bang! Instantly healthy teeth!
Well, it’s a bit more complicated than that, but you get the idea…
There are good pints already about the lack of sugary diets and animals simply dying. I would point out two more things, though.
There certainly are things that clean some animals’ teeth. Cleaner wrasse, for example, set up cleaning stations and allow “client” fish to come by and get cleaned up.
The second point has to do with teeth replacement. Most people learn a factoid when they are young about sharks replacing lost teeth throughout their lives. While this is true, this factoid sort of inverts what is common and what is uncommon. The mammal situation of having only two sets of teeth is the rare case. Most other groups of vertebrates replace their teeth as needed through their lives. So, for non-mammals, tooth problems may be solved by losing the problem tooth and replacing it with another one.
Wild animals *do* get dental problems. Then they just die.
Whether or not you ever notice doesn’t really matter. It’s not like you’re giving dental exams to wild animals on a regular basis.
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