Equine dental technicians learn how to shape teeth to ensure that a horse can chew properly. They must do their work in a 2-foot-long cavity that contains as many as 44 teeth, and they aren't allowed to administer sedatives.

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While Carl Stuckey's left hand wrestled with a flopping pink tongue the size and consistency of a large eel, he tried to maintain a grip on a long, saliva-slimed drill straight from a dental phobic's nightmare.

Stuckey wasn't bothered at all that his arm was up to the elbow in teeth, his boots covered in a milky drool. After all, he spent 21 years working in nuclear-waste cleanup. Compared to that, filing down a horse's incisor is a blast.

"I love it to death," Stuckey said after nearly an hour of grinding on the teeth of a 10-year-old Tennessee walking horse named Jayrue. "You open up the mouth, and it tells you the whole story. And I fix the problems, and it makes that horse healthy."

Stuckey brings his own brand of studied excitement to his job as an equine dental technician, a professional calling he discovered last year during a midlife adjustment period.

Now Stuckey, 53, can tell you everything about the physiology of a horse's mouth.

For instance, adult horses have as many as 44 teeth. As chewing wears down the equine teeth on the exposed end, more tooth erupts at the gum to compensate.

The teeth in a healthy horse's upper and lower jaws fit together perfectly, allowing for an intricate chewing process that grinds food into balls. If the teeth don't rub together evenly, the food doesn't roll into a ball, and the horse fails to get the proper nutrients from the food.

Stuckey spent his childhood in South Carolina around horses and knew of the importance of dental care. When he returned to South Carolina — after his international nuclear-waste career and a few years treasure hunting and deep-sea chartering in Florida — his dream was to renovate an old barn and board horses. But he knew that wouldn't be enough to occupy his intellectual wanderlust.

"I thought, 'There's got to be something else I can do in life that I would enjoy,' " Stuckey said.

His epiphany occurred when a veterinarian came out to work on his horses' teeth.

"They give me a bill for $200 (to) $300, and they can't explain to me what they did," Stuckey said. "That seemed like a heck of a field to get into."

He was a little old to start down the path to veterinary school, but he had another option. Many horse owners turn to equine dental technicians, who are not medical doctors and aren't certified by state officials, to handle the important balancing of horses' teeth.

Stuckey took a two-month course at the American School of Equine Dentistry in Virginia, traveled to Bitterroot Ranch in Wyoming for an intense hands-on internship and soaked up every textbook he could find.

"As easy as it sounds, it's not easy," Stuckey said.

Equine dental technicians don't have to worry about filling cavities as a dentist for humans does, but they must learn a variety of techniques for shaping teeth to "balance the mouth." And they have to do their work in a skinny, 2-foot-long cavity filled more than you might imagine with tongue.

Unlike veterinarians, equine dental technicians aren't allowed to administer sedatives to horses. Stuckey said he sometimes worked on horses without the use of sedatives. In other cases, the owners give their own horses sedatives before the work, which is legal.

Jayrue, who belongs to Stuckey and friend Gwynn Keisler, was sedated for his dental work in April. Only a minute after the shot to a vein in Jayrue's neck, the horse's eyes began to look glassy and his knees became a little wobbly.

Stuckey strapped on a head lamp to throw light down the long mouth cavity. First, he used a small drill to even Jayrue's front teeth. Then a device called a speculum propped open the jaw so Stuckey could insert a long-necked drill with what looked like a mini-sander to file points off the back teeth.

Jayrue rinsed between procedures, but unlike a human he didn't spit into a bowl. He just let the water and saliva drool out, with much of it ending up on Stuckey.

Several times during the procedure, Stuckey closed Jayrue's mouth and rubbed his teeth together, listening for just the right smooth grind. He fine-tuned the teeth with a long-handled device with what looks like a small cheese grater on the end.

"He'll just get fatter now because he can chew so much better," Stuckey said in a comforting, sing-song voice.

"We don't need him to be fatter," Keisler said jokingly. "Then we'll have to ride him more."