Notes & Queries response: Why do cats, dogs and other carnivores have far neater and straighter teeth than humans?

This is my response to a question that appeared on the Notes & Queries page of The Guardian website on 6th November, 2022.

The Guardian is apparently no longer happy to host my comments on their site, so it is appearing here instead.

This blog is obviously not affiliated with The Guardian. Its reference to a question that appeared in Notes & Queries is presented here under the terms of fair use.

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Why do cats, dogs and other carnivores have far neater and straighter teeth than humans?

image generated by Craiyon

“I was doing Bluetooth decades before the whole blooming world jumped on the bandwagon,” boasted Thomas Padginton.

He opened his mouth, pulling back his lips as his jaws widened. It was like watching a big cat yawn away the hours of a hot and dusty afternoon on the plains of the Serengeti.

We were thousands of miles away from Africa, having recently emerged from the vaulted subterranean gloom of Gordon's wine bar, onto Villiers Street, in Central London, where early-Autumn was doing a very convincing impression of mid-Winter.

“Alright there, Marmalade!” shouted an elderly man, who was handing out copies of The Evening Standard to a vanguard of rush hour commuters, in front of the north entrance to Embankment Tube Station.

Padginton raised his hand over the straggling crowds and nodded his head in wordless acknowledgment.

“An old work colleague,” he explained. “He lost his entire pension when Pitchard Tolley went under. He was going to retire to Spain.”

Padginton's upper and lower canines are a luxuriant inky blue. They reflect the light like a syrupy liquid that is perpetually at the point of transitioning to a solid. If you caught only a hurried glimpse of one, you would assume that an over-chewed biro had leaked inside his mouth. They are, of course, completely artificial.

“I had my old ones pulled to make room,” he said. “Well, three of them.”

His confession elicited one of those disquieting twinges of revulsion that are experienced as a wayward electrical current in the veins and the nervous system, rather than in the stomach and the viscera. Briefly, I recalled a hospital dentist wrestling with the hanging threads of my third and final wisdom tooth, the excruciating pain easily overriding the local anaesthetic.

These strange false teeth are called 'fleeters'. They have an unusual origin, as blue-black nodules of the ink that once built up along the edges of the rollers of the London Fleet Street newspaper presses, where they were baked to the hardness of diamonds by the heat of the incessant machinery. Their similarity to canines prompted the men who worked on the presses, and who had lost teeth, to have them incorporated into false sets. Ownership of a fleeter soon became a symbol of status on the presses, to the extent that workers began to remove their perfectly healthy teeth to accommodate these superior replacements. By 1971, the unions were involved and there was a waiting list.

“I know a man who didn't want to pay a dentist for an extraction,” says Padginton. “He went around all the pubs in Shadwell trying to get people riled-up enough to punch him in the mouth. I got my first Fleeter from my dad after I lost a tooth at the age of 13. I was boxing with one of my older brothers who had come home from the navy. At the presses they had earmarked the tooth for my dad but he took pity on me. After that it didn't matter what I wanted to do for a career. With one of those in my mouth I was following him onto the newspapers.”

The era of the fleeter came to an end during the mid 1980s, after the papers began to leave Fleet Street for other parts of London.

“You still hear the expression “fleet of tooth” in some of the pubs along that stretch,” he says. “It refers to someone who worked on the presses back in the day. Print journalism might have settled elsewhere, and a lot of us who worked on Fleet Street have retired, but we old birds still occasionally like to visit our old roosts and reminisce on times long past.”

The remainder of Padginton's mouth is a damnable disaster, reminiscent of an untended Victorian cemetery, with worn teeth jutting out at peculiar angles, from two sets of over-developed gums, like old gravestones. I have noticed, whenever he eats anything, his tongue will push the food from tooth to tooth as if not wishing to overtax any one individual. It is like watching the mastication of some strange reef-bound, marine animal.

“I blame a lifetime of sugary tea and long liquid lunches,” he says. “If I'd been sensible and struck to solids they would have kept the boys upright and in order.”

He may have a point.

“It is astonishing how straight and orderly a cat's teeth are,” says feline dentist, Edith Wallen. “You see it even in strays. It's because the teeth never rigidly set in the gums so they are capable of self-straightening in most cases. Often you'll see a cat with a crooked tooth. A few days later, just through the action of chewing and the natural movement of the mouth, it will have righted itself.”

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Back to that cold and damp Autumn evening on Villiers Street, where the drizzle lingered in the air like a sullen threat of worse weather to follow; one of those ubiquitously overcast days where the barely-visible sun never sets and the opaque sky fades rapidly into a gloomy and unsatisfying darkness.

“So what will happen to your set of fleeters when you pop your clogs?” I asked.

I have since discovered that you can have this kind of frank discussion with Thomas. I didn't know thia at the time. I had reverted to a base level of tactlessness that is my default whenever I am tired. 

“There's a list in my will. Various old co-workers. Whoever's left can make a claim. I was once asked by a museum if I would be willing to donate them to their collection. They would be wasted behind glass. I think that it's important to keep them in circulation.”

I hope this is of help.

image generated by Craiyon