When Pete Emily graduated from dental school in the 1960s, no one even thought of working on animal teeth, other than “cleaning and pulling.”
As a brand-new dentist, Emily returned to his roots in north Denver, where he opened a small dental practice for human teeth. But his love of show dogs distracted him, and soon he was trying to fix their teeth as well.
Emily worked days on humans and spent his spare time learning about animals and their dental problems.
He’s worked on Siegfried & Roy’s tigers and jaguars, cared for Triple Crown winners Secretariat and Seattle Slew, fixed the beaks of exotic birds and put a gold crown on a wild, black-footed ferret.
“Pete taught us all,” said Dr. Tom Mulligan, a San Diego veterinarian and another pioneer in animal dentistry, who lectured around the world for 20 years with Emily. “He probably still is the greatest vet dentist in the world. He showed us all kinds of new ideas and techniques. He’s the man.”
Even though he wasn’t a veterinarian, Emily helped establish the American College of Veterinary Dentistry in 1987-88 and wrote the qualifying examinations to become board-certified. Each year, the ACVD bestows the Peter Emily Award on the nation’s top veterinary dentist.
In 1988, Emily co-founded the British Veterinary Dental Society, which began with four members and now has 1,000.
Not bad for a kid who grew up speaking Italian on Denver’s north side. When the Denver Zoo heard about his work with dogs in the early 1970s, it asked if he could help a hyena with an abscessed tooth. Emily’s work began to take shape.
“There were no instruments then,” he recalled, “so I modified my human instruments to work on animals. A root-canal file for a human is about 1.5 inches long, but I needed one about 6 inches long for the hyena. So I soldered an extension on the handle, and it worked.”
Word about the Denver man’s pioneering successes in animal dentistry spread.
“Before I knew it, I was working on everything, even a root canal on a Bengal tiger. … The idea was roughly the same as working on humans,” he said.
Emily’s lifelong passion has been for dogs, but he also has a special interest in exotic birds and pheasants, which he used to raise in Golden. At the Denver Zoo, an ibis lost the bottom half of its long, thin bill, so Emily crafted a new one out of dentistry acrylic. He also straightened out a toucan’s dysfunctional beak that crossed over.
“Pete Emily is a real pioneer in animal dentistry,” said Dr. Robert Wiggs, a top veterinary dentist in Dallas. “Many of the tools we use wouldn’t work properly until Pete modified them.”
Emily is in his 70s and semi-retired.
His interests are broad. “You get to the point where you appreciate all forms of life,” he said.
He makes jewelry: gold pendants of people’s pets or their hobbies.
He has cast bronze sculptures, mostly of dogs, although there’s one of his father seated on a bench telling him stories.
He has written and lectured extensively on the muscular development of race horses, including motion studies with photography.
He has written three textbooks on dentistry and is working on three more, including one on the history of teeth.
“I think this stuff is really interesting,” he said. “But probably five people will buy the book.”
Staff writer Mike McPhee can be reached at 303-820-1409 or mmcphee@denverpost.com.
