Why do humans need to brush their teeth but no other animals need to?
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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.
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