Know more about Goats teeth.

Goats have no top teeth and instead have a hard dental pad that their bottom incisors bite against. 

You can estimate the age of goats by the age at which the milk teeth are replaced by permanent incisors. They get new ones in pairs working from the middle outwards. 

You can often get a shock when you see the state of a goat’s teeth. Teeth do an enormous amount of tearing and pulling of fibrous herbage and are subject to great mechanical stresses. 

Here are some things regularly seen: 

The overshot teeth may be only partly overshot where the back half contacts the gum and the front half has a lance-like edge that can lacerate your fingers. Goats with undershot parrot-mouths have great difficulty in eating short pasture.

Gum cavities that still have both the old tooth present and the new one pushing it out, and the gum looking very inflamed.

Missing permanent teeth, especially the central pair which are critical for grazing. Very long wobbly teeth that are loose in the gum. This may be “periodontal disease” which has many causes and there’s not much you can do about it.

Most permanent teeth missing and only an odd single very long loose tooth left. It’s better to pull this out to even up the sheep’s bite. No permanent teeth at all – the goat is described as being “broken mouthed” or called a “gummy”. They have all worn off by the gum. In pumice country this can be a special problem with the very abrasive nature of the soil.

If all the teeth are worn right down to the gum but are still there, it’s very difficult to age the goat as you cannot tell which stumps are temporary and which are permanent teeth.

Long permanent teeth where grass has been getting in between them and wearing away great holes. 

Goats with no teeth can still manage to eat if there is plenty of pasture available, as the front teeth only bite off the grass and the back incisors do the grinding. 

When fed root crops like turnips, they really need good teeth to break the skin of the bulb and eat it down to ground level once the leafy top has been eaten. Also good teeth are important if goats are to browse hard woody shrubs.