Today’s article is a very useful tool in guiding your decision making during buying new animals both for breeding and production purposes. Veterinarians generally use this technique also, to guess the approximate age of an animal where data or acquisition history of the animal may be deficient. In the absence of any defect or accidents, dentition of ruminants has proven and remained one of the popular and easy means to determine their age.
An adult sheep or goat has a total of 32 teeth. There are four pairs of incisors and twelve molars on the lower jaw whilst twelve molars and a dental pad are found on the upper jaw. Lambs and kids have temporary/milk teeth (incisors) which will eventually fall out and be replaced by permanent teeth.
The incisors therefore play a major role in enabling us to approximate the age of a sheep or goat (I I I I I I I I). When your ruminant is about a year old, the middle pair of incisors get replaced by a pair of permanent incisors (I I I I I I I I). After another year (2 years old), they have an additional pair of incisors replaced by permanent teeth (I l I I I I l I). By their fourth year, all four incisors would have been replaced by permanent teeth (I I I I I I I I).
As they animals age (beyond 5 years), the teeth begin to space out, and then break or fall out. A sheep whose teeth are all fallen out (approximately 10 years old) is called a ‘’gummer”/” gummy’’.
Picture credit:Royal Veterinary College. Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 International