Welcome to the Maine Farmcast. I am your host, Dr. Colt Knight, associate extension professor and the state livestock specialist from University of Maine Cooperative Extension. And today, we are joined by my close friend and colleague, doctor Robert Cozzi. I do not know doctor Causey's official title, but we all call him the horse professor. He runs the the horse program here at the University of Maine, and he talks a little funny, so you have to have to put your listening ears on real closely to.

But you've been used to hearing my hillbilly dialect, so his proper British accent should be quite easy to decipher after that.

Somewhat proper. Somewhat? Somewhat slightly improper, but that's as time goes on.

Robert, it is great to have you on the podcast today.

Delighted to be here, Colt.

Doctor. Causey and I share quite a few things in common. I used to be a horse person. He still is a horse person. We both play guitar.

We both like to drink bourbon. And I guess we're both professors here at the University of Maine.

Indeed. Yeah. I'm an associate professor, so I'm not all the way to the top of the ladder, but halfway up, two thirds the

way up, perhaps. So what is your your actual title, and what do you do?

So my title is I am an associate professor in animal veterinary sciences, which is part of the school of food and agriculture. And what I do is I'm a I'm a veterinarian, I should add, and, got a got my veterinary degree from Minnesota and a PhD from LSU, and then worked in the vet school also at, University of Florida in the in the hospital for a couple of years. And then I came here as an assistant professor with the charge to start a teaching and research program built around horses. And my job has been to try to keep that program going through all kinds of storms and and squalls and stormy weather, so to speak.

Budget cuts.

Budget cuts, and so forth for, since 1998. And I look back on it, and I feel very fortunate to have been able to spend so much of my time dealing with horses in the way I've been dealing with them. It's a lot been a lot of fun. Really enjoy it. And I'm still doing it.

And the closer I end up at the farm, the more time I spend at the farm, the happier I am. And pretty soon I'll just be sweeping the aisleways up there, probably. But, feels feels great to be up there.

So I'm gonna come back and touch on this horse program here at the University of Maine. But first, I'd like to know, how did you get to Maine, and how did you get into the horse industry?

So I the way I got to Maine was that it's it's kind of a personal personal story. I was really climbing up the ladder in retrospect fairly well by getting a a DVM, then a, did an internship at residency. Sorry. Residency and a PhD at LSU, and then got board certified in in Theriogenology, which is the veterinary reproduction veterinary reproduction specialty, basically. And and, having been an in clinical instructor at the University of Florida for, two years, I was pretty well set to get a faculty position at a vet school.

Two things brought me to Maine. The first was that a professor here, Jim Weber, was they were looking for somebody to start a horse program from scratch, basically. It wasn't ends up not being quite from scratch, but we could talk about that later. But start a horse program involving, with teaching and research, which was kind of a cool opportunity, in fact, and one could use that and then build on that on that ass on that career. And the other reason was that I was in a relationship with a lovely woman who, herself was a veterinarian and, her twin, and they were willing to move from Louisiana, it turned out, to come to Maine.

And so we all came up here in the middle of the ice storm, and sadly, they felt that the ice storm was not for them and the weather was not for them. And by that point, I was I was here. And so I stayed with some regrets about them leaving. But as I said, lovely lovely people, like she was and and her twin. But I came here by myself.

Having gotten here, one thing that I suddenly had to deal with even before it involved horses was undergraduates as a different kind of a student body to, veterinary students. And the undergraduates here were and this this is a very good thing, were outspoken, independent, had no hesitation about walking up to faculty members or administrators and saying this is what we want to do and have have happened. And the prelude to my arriving at UMaine was the students had, three students had gone to the dean, Bruce Dean Bruce Weirsma, and they said, dean Weirsma, we we don't think you understand what horses mean to us. And Bruce Weirsma, who had at that time a a 19 or 20 year old or at least a daughter at some level who was an equestrian said, well, actually, I think I do know what horses mean to you. And they initiated they initiated a a boarding program, boarding horses up at the farm that students were students could bring in their horses and board them.

And that created, some of the infrastructure that we have up there, mostly the stalls and the paddocks. But, also, I did brought bring horses in, and then very shortly after that, I came along. And, my my goal, because you can't really teach and do research with student animals, felt that the best way to approach, from from my standpoint, a research and teaching program was to work with the local horse industry, and that big industry was the main standard bred organization. The farm superintendent at the time, it's interesting how you can suddenly pinpoint these precise moments. The farm superintendent at the time's name was Glenn Dickey.

And Glenn was really was a burly mountain kind of a man, and enjoyed, muzzle loading rifles and this kind of stuff. They go out in round ups and retreat.

One does.

As one does. They go out and they really had a really had a good time with it. And he was he was very kindly showing me around. The nice thing is people Glenn and I were so different. We could get along very well.

There was never any sort of competition between us. And he was showing me around Bangor, and we just instantly sort of drove by Bangor Raceway. And I suddenly the penny dropped, and I suddenly realized we've got a standard bred, population up here. And if we've a standard bred of population of racehorses up here, got a population of people trying to get rid of horses. And so we've set up the program to, based on my, I call it, so called expertise in equine reproduction to use standard breads standard bread mares, donated to the university that basically created the the research teaching and research herd up here.

That that herd, the requirements for that herd would be that all the animals that we received would be mares, females, or fillies, I suppose, depending on what you're how you wanna call them, but less than 10 years of age. And young animals, that were sound and needed would would could go on to have a good home. And so in addition to, soliciting horses, donations of horses from the local standard bred industry, we I was having a conversation with a a woman who some of you some of the audience may recognize the name of Robin Cuffy, who, sadly is very sadly is no longer with us. And Robin wrote the book on retraining the standard bread horse, literally wrote the book. And she was based down I I think it's Gorham, Maine.

And, I was in a had a conversation with her, and she said and and this is literally 1998. She said, if you get these x-ray sources up, standard breads, and get them into the barn, what you have is the opportunity to retrain them to become pleasure horses, and then they and then then you can sell them to to generate income for your program.

You know, that's how I got started in the horse industry.

Go on. I I I didn't know your full history, Colt, but I'd be

interested to hear a little bit. I I guess the the first thing, we had some milk goats that we use to control honeysuckle vines on the hillside in West Virginia. And my dad told my mom if she got rid of those goats, because this was summer or fall, come springtime, he would get a pony for me. Well, within about three days, we had the goats gone. And this little black stallion pony that was, you know, just like a little Shetland pony, and it was not broke to ride.

And so I would just put on my walls coveralls and get on that pony and to get bucked off relentlessly until eventually I could ride it.

And and how old were you when you would be getting

bucked Maybe 10 maybe 10 years old, somewhere around in there. The my first hat is actually in the studio now, my But black hat on top. Anyway, and then within a week, maybe two weeks, my mom couldn't stand it and then she had a horse and then we would go trail riding.

I see. You're you're the pony.

My mom had a horse. I had a pony, and dad would ride the four wheeler. Well, that got old quick. So dad had to get a horse. And then mom had to upgrade horses.

And then I outgrew the pony. And but anyway, we we got into a cycle. My dad would go to the livestock auctions and purchase old standard bred track horses. And at that time, they you know, a a non broke standard bread might might be $203,100 dollars bucks, whatever the meat pin prices were. Right.

You know, you'd look for those tattoos. You'd look and see if they were pacers or not. We didn't want the trotters.

You didn't want the trotters.

No, we wanted the pace and horses.

Can I ask can I ask why?

Because you could teach the pacers to rack Oh. Majority of the times. So you could have a really smooth So so this is pleasure horse.

This is sort of your correct me if I'm wrong, but your sort of cheap version of a gated horse. Yes. Like a Tennessee walker or something.

Yeah. Well, I came from a very rural Yeah. Poor part of the country. Fair. So Yep.

We couldn't afford those fancy Tennessee walking horses, but you could take a standardbred that was a pacer, and with some chains and some training, teach them to rack and make really nice pleasure horses. And I've gotta be honest, the standardbreds had a way better temperament than most of those walking horses horses ever thought about having. Absolutely. Yeah. And so, you know, that snowballed and then we were showing standardbreds and everything.

And I was the youngest commissioner for the standardbred under Saddle Association out of Pikeville, Kentucky. And, you know, so we had racking horse shows. Sometimes they'd be coupled along with saddle breads and walking horse shows. So I was exposed to all of that. And, one of the highlights of all those shows at the end of the night was the, fast paced class, where they just get on these these standard breads.

And it was supposed to be a horse show, but it was basically just a controlled wild ass race, basically. And so anything went. You know, they just they just dropped the reins, and those horses went aerodynamic mode. They dropped their necks down even with their backline. Their nose went out, and they just flat out paced around there.

And you had, you know, you had to keep it kinda close to the rail. You couldn't cut the corners or anything.

So how many how many other people had standard doing this? Was it just you or was it

No. No. Just most of the folks around that part of the world were riding standard breads or racking horses. At the time, you could commission a standard bread, a racking horse.

Okay.

Prior to that, they wouldn't commission a standard bread. So but everybody lied about it. So those lip tattoos they put in standard breads, they would actually re tattoo over them to block the numbers out so that they could be registered as a racking horse so that you could show them as a racking horse. So, you know, I guess technically the racking horses were the big thing Yeah. Where I came from, but most of them were all just standard breds.

But anyway, that's that's how I got into the

The the the standard breds are great horses. We could never have set up the program we did here, I feel, with thoroughbreds. We'd have had it would have been too wild. Or put it this way, I'm a kind of a quiet guy and I'm not a lion tamer, so to speak. But with the with the beginning students, standard breads was gonna work and thoroughbreds would probably wouldn't have worked.

When I was an undergraduate at the University of Kentucky, I actually lived and worked at a thoroughbred consignment farm in Paris, Kentucky. You know, we had football players and famous people had their horses there. It was so foreign to me how they trained those thoroughbreds compared to just a regular riding horse, you know? Yeah. Those that we you expected the thoroughbreds to pull you while you were leading them, you know, so you stood at their shoulder, and you wanted them basically to pull you along.

And so we were constantly training them, putting that drive into them to race.

Interesting.

Yep. Yeah. And it was

One of the best foundational experiences for me when I was going through vet school was, at the Middleburg Training Track with a trainer named Barbara Graham in Virginia. And I had in a sense grown up with horses to some degree with my mother, but being put into a thoroughbred barn in Virginia with two and three year olds was a very much a different experience. But that told me what a horse could how a horse might behave, how a horse would behave, and how you should always be ready for a horse to behave. And yet with all that, you still have to get the job done.

Yep.

And, just hot walking thoroughbreds around around the the the barn, after they've been exercising was, in a strange way, the real basis of horse handling and just putting the even just the chain over the nose. You know? There was you had to be very careful and sensible how you did it and all that sort of stuff. The the thoroughbred industry was probably one of the best places really to learn everything that a horse could do. And again, I consider that for me a foundational experience, really was.

But getting back to the horse program here at the University of Maine, so you found a local trainer to work with.

We, yeah, we went with-

Standard breads.

We did. We needed to get a trainer and a first trainer. Again, we've been very lucky in the trainers that we've had overall. Sandy Welsh was her name and or is her name. And she, ultimately, she she just jumped straight in and established the standard bread drill team, in fact.

And so probably in 1999, we dragged out onto the Bangor Raceway somewhere between ten and fifteen standard beds with students on them. And they did a drill, in front of the stand, and nobody got hurt. And we got the horses out there, we got the horses back, and and we're we were very lucky. But that's what we did. And so Sandy Welsh was was our our first trainer, and then she went off to do other things.

And then we had Jan Hartwell for several several years. And Jan, probably is very, very broad, but, more a little more Western. She has some some Western background, but she did a great job. Then she left, and we hired Cassie Astell in about '20 2010, I think it was. And, she brought more of a very disciplined dressage focus that has continued on for about fourteen, fifteen years, and is the basis of how we've been sort of taking care of the students and the horses up until now.

And most recently, we have, Haley Stroud who is, continuing to help us with the standard breads and all that sort of stuff. So we've had some we've had oh, I forget. We also had Melissa Spencer as well, for about four years, who did some great stuff for us. And Melissa was excellent with handling stallions as well as, the mares. So we've had some really great horse people and great trainers up up here.

In terms of great horse industry people, I do need to give a shout out to Valerie Grondin and the harness well, first of the harness racing industry. From almost our first meeting, when we talked about the horse program, I got dragged in to meet our associate Dean Alkezes, who it turned out said on my first meeting, I didn't know what an associate dean was gonna say. He said, well, I grew up training standard breads in Newholt in in New Jersey. And, he was all into us having a racehorse. So we got a we a we got donated a standard bred racehorse named Venus of Milo was was the horse's name.

Donated to us by Tom Cole, who was the, at that time, the executive director of the main harness racing promotions board. He had just been I think he just he was into that position. And, Tom Cole donated to us Venus of Milo. I think Tom was originally from Milo, Maine. I had family in Milo, Maine.

And, we had then for a horse racing at Bengal Raceway, and we have had a horse racing at Bengal Raceway from 1999 through twenty twenty ten, eleven, or twat 2012, I think, was the was the final time with the wideout, Pembroke wideout. But that got us involved with the harness racing program, harness racing industry. And one of our hugest, supporters and advisers to this was Don Marine, who some people will know about. He's, the US Trading Association's one of the leaders of the USDA in the state and has been a huge supporter and donated us a lot of great animals. So the other thing about the harness racing horses, I don't know if you wanna hear about research or not, but Yeah.

Lay it on us. Lay it on you. So the the we one of my, what's the what's the word I'm looking for? Principles or or things that I try to live by as as someone that works with horses and teaches and does research is as much as possible, do any anything you do things that do not hurt the animal or do not compromise the animal. And that's so that the animal could then the horse could then go and be go to a go to a, a good owner and be not be damaged, but basically be if the horse was at the farm, at the at the widow center where we raised them, the horses would be improved over time.

So we did that, and we had that trainer. And and we did we've done some research that I'm quite proud of. One of the research projects we did was with a colleague named, Rob Leonard and, also Ken McKeever down at Rutgers. And we took pregnant mares, up at the Witter Center about, I think we had four pregnant mares over a couple of years. We trotted them in a circle on a lunge line, and we then did an EKG of the mare's heart rate and the fetal heart rate.

And you can do a fetal can detect the heart rate of the fetus using an EKG. You see the mare's trace and the fetal trace both sort of superimposed on each other. And what we found was that exercising the mare caused the fetal heart rate to stay the same or decrease slightly. And what the way we've interpreted this is that the fetus is really protected from the mare's exercise. If anything, it's actually enriched from the mare's exercise with the increased arterial oxygen supply and all that sort of stuff.

So bottom line is, you know, as far as a pregnant male goes, feel free to exercise them at least through mid, up to the, towards the end of gestation. Do things that you normally would do with them. Another excellent supporter of our program, Dennis Ruxanese, I believe said, Until you can't girth them, keep riding them, if that's what you're doing. It's like the recommendations for women. If you're running before you got pregnant, keep running as as long as you can.

Just keep doing the things that you did before. So we showed that exercise for a pregnant mare is is probably better than not exercising. So we're glad we did that. It builds up also builds up the abdominal muscles. So when that mare has to squirt out a 75 pound foal, which is a huge workout, they are cardiovascular cardiovascularly capable of doing it and also have the muscular tone, maybe what we would call a core strength to do it as well.

So exercising a mare, pregnant mare is is really valuable. The other project we did that, I was really proud of is I was working with a colleague named John Timoney at at the at Gluck at the University of Kentucky. And this was a situation where we found that if we were to vaccinate mares intranasally against a uterine pathogen in the horse, Streptococcus zooepidemicus, so we actually can vaccinate in the in the nose. And a lot of us have had may have had the COVID vaccine through the nose. I'm trying to kind of trying to remember the COVID vaccine now.

It's been so long, but it might've been an intranasal version of it. And, by creating a mucosal immunity, mucosal the mucus surface is the surface of the gut and the lungs and the reproductive tract. And if you inoculate one part of the reproduct, one part of the mucosal, system, you can essentially have that mucosal immunity transferred to the others. So we put this vaccine ups basically aerosolized it up into the nose, and we created an antibody response in the uterus, to that to that it was strep it was a strep, vaccine. And we were also able to show with a small study that the mares that were vaccinated, cleared the bacteria more quickly than the mares that were not vaccinated.

So it was a really nice, really in some respects a pilot study because there were so few MERS in the challenging challenge group. But a nice way of of looking at the possibility that vaccinating in the nose could create an immune response in the uterus and the horse. And, really, really pleased with that. It was actually funded by the USDA. So big thanks to them back in the early two thousands.

And then the the other research project, that I'm pleased with involved, and there have been a few others, but the other one that's, I'm most pleased with was looking at the mucosal surface of the uterus. I noticed, on some when I was LSU and during a residency, we would look at samples from the uterine surface. We would see these epithelial cells with hairs on them. These are what we call cilia, and these would be fixed specimens. Like, what on earth are we doing with ciliated cells from the endometrium of a horse, the uterine lining of the horse?

And gradually, through various pro long process of how mucosal surfaces clean themselves up, I realized that what was happening in the uterus appeared to be similar, not quite the same, but similar as what happens in the respiratory tract, in the lungs, in the nasal cavity. Well, not the lungs, sorry, the the the the trachea, the the bronchus, and the upper respiratory tract of ciliary clearance. The the the and the equine uterus produces mucus, but it also has cells that beat and sweep the mucus out of the uterus, out through the cervix, and into, and out basically, the the back end of the the the vaginal opening. And it the the way the horse cleans infections is mostly by what we call physical clearance. It's by just dumping that stuff out versus having these nasties immune cells come in and squirt things that kill things.

That causes inflammation. So, basically, the mucociliary clearance allows the uterus to get rid of bacteria and get rid of pathogens without getting inflamed. And that was, and we were able to, take endoscopes and put them into, into a horse, and we watched the these currents moving. And with this end, of of of the movement of things coming out of the uterus, and we also with these with these high high magnification endoscopes, we could literally see red blood cells moving through capillaries in in the endometrium. It was pretty amazing.

We're really focusing on the cervix because the cervix is loaded with with cilia. And there's a very famous theoriginologist, equine reproductive expert named Oleg Ginther, who you you may have heard of. A lot of anybody in the veterinary field would have. And the cervix is loaded with cilia and has these these folds that increase the effectiveness of the cilia, by by basically making sure there's not a lot of free space above the cilia, but they're these channels that sweep stuff out. And so that was the the research I've done fairly recently.

When I say my age, recently is the last ten years. And then finally, perhaps the and there's many things that I've been doing, but the other thing that we also did with a with a student named Victoria Sorrentino was and was to look at the ability of forage. We have to increase mastication in in horses by adding the from Lucerne Farms, we could we get this this this bagged forage, which is excellent stuff. Mix it with grain, and the horse will masticate more, chew more as they're consuming the grain. By masticating, the horse generates more saliva, and by generating more saliva, it generates more buffer.

By generating more buffer, it protects the, the stomach so it reduces ulcers if you're if you're feeding grain.

So Does that have any effect on the teeth if they chew more? Like, do you have to float their teeth as often?

That's a really good question. I don't know the answer to that. I suspect not too much because or if if if they're chewing more, sure, they might be there might be some more wear and tear, but that chewing means that they're doing what we want them to do. Whereas if you just give them grain and they swallow it, they're not chewing, but their stomach's getting acid and they're getting ulcers and that kind of stuff. So so I guess we just have to live with the the the dental aspect of it and make sure that we we stay ahead of, you know, daily dentals and that kind not daily, annual dental exams and stuff like that.

So it's a good point, but I would rather have the horse need to be floated a little or we need to have some dental work than get ulcers. Mhmm.

So Well, that was great hearing about the research and the history of the horse program here at the University of Maine. Is there anything you'd like to tell us about the future or or prospects or or hopes or

Future prospects and hopes. We we private funding helps us a lot. So anybody that wants to donate, donate to the equine program that free. The, I think I think the hope is to, have the program sustainable, that we don't have to have a huge number of horses, but there is a sort of a minimum number that we wanna try to maintain so the students can have a good opportune a good up good hands on experience. And I don't know whether I mentioned this or not.

We want these students to go to vet school. And even if the horse did not become equine practitioners, I kinda hope they do, but if they don't, this equine experience at the Widow Centre helps us get them into vet school. It means that a lot of the students come and say that their horse experience is so much higher than a lot of their classmates in vet school. So I feel very good about that. The horse is a wonderful animal because for for a pre vet student because it's you deal with them on an individual basis.

You do there's reasons to do physical exams, listen to the heart, listen to gut sounds, evaluate lameness, problem solve things that may happen with an animal. We do see, know, obviously we occasionally see colics and things up at the farm and we have to address them and deal with it. And so that's a good experience for students if they wanna go to vet school because we really dig in and help them with that.

Well, Dr. Causey, it was great to have you on the podcast.

Oh, it's great to

meet We appreciate you sitting down and giving us this history lesson.

My pleasure. My pleasure.

This is the first time I've heard the history of the horse program here. So I

learned a lot. Good. And

if our listeners would like to learn more about the horse program, or if you have questions, comments or concerns, please reach out to the podcast at extension.farmcast@main.edu. Oh, that busted gut when he said squirt out a.

That? Saw a wiki dash. It's that's like that's what's yeah. No. No.

Occasionally, they do. Mhmm. And you've probably seen it yourself.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. I I was I had I was on full watch for a long time on some of those farms that I worked at.