One of the things we learned from spending 30 years teaching university students about horse management is that the human mind is desperate to reduce complex phenomenon to the least common denominator. Or, to reduce that thought to its simplest expression-"the human mind is determined to look for ways to make hard things easy."

One of the more-challenging tasks is to age a horse with a full mouth of permanent teeth-those over 10 years of age. In the big sale barn horse auctions of years past, the ringman would send the horse in for bidding after looking in his mouth by proclaiming his age: "He's a 5-year-old! He's a 3-year-old!" But if the horse was over 10, the ringman would simply say, "Smooth mouthed!" No one wanted to go out on a limb and say just how much over 10 that horse was.