Why do humans need to brush their teeth but no other animals need to?
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I think your premise is a bit flawed. It very well may be the case that if animals brushed their teeth they would have better oral health..they just can’t. Humans also ingest manufactured goods and drinks that are more likely to cause cavities as well.
Our sugar heavy diets and long lifespans make it more important for us to keep teeth clean and healthy so they last all our lives
Sugar. Also comparatively low fiber in our diets (which does the job for other animals), but mostly pure sugar turns into an acidic byproduct in our mouth which can build up on our teeth if we don’t brush it off.
There’s also our lifespan; 20 years isn’t enough time for tooth decay to be a problem in most cases.
There’s also what animals do instead of brushing, such as chewing on plants or eating more fibrous foods.
And there’s also biological adaptions that humans don’t have. A shark constantly replaces their teeth. A rodent’s teeth continually grows instead of stopping. Birds don’t have conventional teeth.
In other cases, animals get bad teeth. If this happens in the wild, and the animal isn’t a social one and cared for by others, they die. So humans just don’t see the animals that would have needed brushing.
It is because of cooking. Humans lost the need to eat lots of raw and tough foods that put evolutionary pressure on the teeth of the species as a whole. This has ultimately caused human teeth to spread out. The space between teeth is the main problem that leads to premature decay and loss. This is also why humans often have crooked teeth unlike most other animals.
Also many animals “brush their teeth” in a different way by mechanisms like piercing skin of prey or seeking the right types of plants to chew on. If you have a house cat you may notice they often like to bite through plastic items like cords or plastic shower curtains as a way to clean their teeth.
Not a scientist of any kind, but the answer feels fairly intuitive to me. Tooth decay is mostly caused by bacteria that live in your mouth and feed on simple sugars left from the food you eat. Humans are among the few (only?) species of animal that ingest a significant amount of simple sugars in their diet, which is why we’re concerned about tooth decay.
Not entirely sure, but I expect that both animals that eat 100% meat or 100% grass won’t have this problem due to a lack of sugar. Maybe animals that largely subsist on fruit (containing fructose, a simple sugar) will? But then again, some (many?) animal species also have their teeth continually replaced, unlike most mammals (including humans) who only have two sets of teeth in their entire lifetimes.
Even so, while experiencing tooth decay can be excruciating, it likely won’t kill you except in the most extreme cases (e.g. a tooth gets infected, or the pain renders you unable to eat). I’m willing to bet that a lot of animals’ quality of life would be improved by having access to a dentist (or just regular brushing, if they could be arsed), but even the absence of all that isn’t really making a huge impact in animal species populations as a whole.
Humans eat more sugar which causes cavities in teeth, humans live longer relative to evolutionary extremes of species so teeth are more prone to “wearing out” if not cared for.
I was just at the aquarium and they were brushing the teeth of a harbor seal. They do it every day.
The harbor seal is 32 years old. In the wild they get gingivitis and the average life span is 8-10 years.
Better healthcare is very helpful to animals.
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