Straight from the horses mouth

Mark Burnell has a message on his phone. ''You've called Mark Burnell,'' it says, ''the horse dentist.'' He's one of only a few in Victoria and he's done the teeth of five runners in today's Caulfield Cup, including wonderful favourite December Draw.Horse dentist Mark Burnell checks up on El Stupende's dental health at Caulfield. Photo: Joe Armao

His job is as ancient as kept horses and essentially a simple one: maintain the mouth. This is very important to a trainer because a racehorse with good teeth will run faster. Burnell has been doing it all his working life, about 26 years. He's heard all the jokes.

''Straight from the horse's mouth,'' he says. ''Why the long face. All of them.'' And Mr Ed - ''a horse is a horse of course of course''.

Burnell also knows he has an unusual job and he doesn't hide that away. The jokes he takes well and gives a few back. For example, he does donkeys too, and calls a donkey a ''Jesus mobile''. To this day, no horse, he says, has ever written him a letter of complaint after a dental appointment.

But he also knows as well as being unusual, it's interesting. He sees it as animal welfare because he helps the horses be their best.

Burnell's grandfather Ian Gilmour had a dairy in Coburg and had 50 delivery horses, most of whom he got to know. He was born to respect horses because of that. Then when his own parents moved to Yarra Glen they had thoroughbreds.

When he was 16 - in the 1970s - he met Ted McLean, who was the dentist for 24 Melbourne Cup winners and worked for legendary Geelong trainer George Hanlon. Ted's father William McLean was a horse dentist too and tended to Phar Lap at the stables in Manchester Grove, Caulfield.

Burnell started working for Ted McLean and then bought the business off him, inheriting some of William McLean's tools. He now sees horses at Caulfield, Flemington, Cranbourne and Mornington for top trainers such as Bart and Anthony Cummings, Colin Little, Danny O'Brien and Mark Kavanagh.

He has a calm and true affinity with the animals and he needs it because he sticks metal tools into their mouths. But they let him do it because he can communicate with them with a ''horse sense''.

''You can use all the words you like to a horse, but it can hear what's in your insides,'' he says. By that, he means whether you pose a threat. ''The best thing is not to rush and to see what the horse is telling you.''

Burnell has learnt that when a horse blinks, it trusts him. If an ear is bent, it's ''ear-shy'' and the horse is anxious.

Teeth are important to race horses for four reasons. The first is that they move. The second is the ''bit'' that goes in their mouths; it has to be unobstructed to work properly.

The third is that horses such as those who run at Caulfield today need to eat efficiently to be in prime condition with good energy. Bad teeth mean bad eating. The fourth is that horse feed can wear teeth down; they need to be kept even.

Burnell wears a grey workman's coat like his mentor Ted McLean did. He fills up a bucket with disinfected water and puts his ''mediaeval'' tools in it - the rasps, grinders, ''Baby John'' burgesses and gags.

Then he files horses' teeth, his hands ending up covered in mucous ''like something out of an Alien movie''. Sometimes he'll extract the horse version of wisdom teeth, called ''wolf teeth''.

The tools, he says, haven't changed for 100 years in some cases.

He doesn't clean their teeth. It's not a beauty contest. ''It's about being kind to them and keeping the horses happy,'' he says.