The Silent Stressor in Your Horse’s Life - Dr. Barbara Murphy

So I typically kick the episodes off by having the guests tell us who they are and what it is they do. Thank you very much for inviting me, Samantha. I am. My name is Barbara Murphy and I am an associate professor at University College Dublin in Ireland. I’m also the founder of Equiloom, where I act as Chief Scientific Officer, so I help work with manage the research projects that we are interested in.

But my main role is as a university lecturer and I run a degree program on animal science, equine. So it’s a type of equine science degree. Awesome. And so how did you get involved in the teaching side of things, especially in Equine Science I? Grew up not in an equine family, not in a very horsey family, but we did have a pony when we were young and I as a typical little girl loved all things horse related.

My room was just covered in posters of horse and hound magazine and all sorts of the usual. Only ever had a pony and then when I was in secondary school we had an opportunity in our transition year to do work experience on a racing yard and I worked one day a week at a local racing yard down in West Cork in Ireland. And I really fell in love with riding out thoroughbreds, understanding a little bit about how they were bred when it came to choosing my degree for college, much to the annoyance of my parents. I decided to do equine science at the University of Limerick because I had visited during an open day, and I heard the students talking about their experience working on a stud farm in Kentucky and the thought of working in the bluegrass on a big farm with loads of mirrors and foals and driving trucks around the place. It just went.

Yeah, I’d love to do this. So that is the degree that I opted for. And I got to go to Kentucky in my third year and worked for Coolmore out there. And it was an amazing experience. But I had lots of questions about how mayors were being treated, what sort of hormones we were giving them, how we were trying to get them to cycle early in the year using light.

And there wasn’t always satisfactory answers to the questions, the people working there. So when I finished my degree, I had made some contacts at the University of Kentucky, and one of the professors in there said, look, you seem to have a lot of questions. If you get good grades, maybe you consider coming back and doing a graduate’s degree. So I never thought I would, but lo and behold, when I finished my degree, I spent six months working as a stud secretary. And as great as it was, I just was a little bored by it and thought maybe I should take up this possibility of trying to go back and do a master’s or a PhD.

And what started out as a master’s turned into a six year PhD in the Department of Veterinary Science at the University of Kentucky. And why it was so long was I got interested in a whole new area of equine research that hadn’t been done before. And it was an A field of science that was becoming really exciting in the human world. And I thought, why can’t we do this in horses? That’s what my path was and I was very lucky that when I finished my PhD there was an opening for faculty at the University College Dublin to run a new degree programme on equine science and I was very lucky that I just fell back into a role back in Ireland.

I would have loved to have stayed on and do some post doctorate training at some other cool places in the US, but I’m was very grateful to be able to get home and put my all my years of college into practice teaching more students. So you are on this path of studying just equine science at large, and then you get into this niche subject of what I’m assuming is the equine chronobiology. I hope I got all of that. What do you think it was about light and how light interacts with horses that kind of caught your attention? So there were two things.

The first thing that stuck with me from having worked on stud farms is we knew and the industry knew that if you fool mares into thinking it’s spring before it’s spring by leaving the lights on longer over them in the stable, then that would kick start the reproductive system. So they’d have foals earlier in the year. But the only way they were doing this was standing them in the stable with the lights on. And for fertility, it’s not the always the healthiest to have mayor standing inside for 16 hours a day. They’d go out in the middle of the day, but they’d come back in at 3:00 and they’d be standing in until eight, 9:00 the following morning again.

And I thought, surely there’s a way to do this in another manner. And do they really need light to both eyes? So that was in my head. But the other real thing that I was thinking of was lighting controls our body clock, and I became very interested in circadian rhythms, which are these 24 hour rhythms in every aspect of our Physiology. And why I became interested in these rhythms is when we feel jet lagged after travelling across multiple time zones, it’s because our body clock is disturbed.

It cannot catch up to the new time zone because it didn’t evolve to deal with rapidly changing sunrises and sunset times. It’s used to this consistent rhythmical nature of the 24 hour light dark cycle. And why I was interested in that was we ship horses all over the world for competition. A lot of race horses fly across the world and compete in a different time zone and fly back that evening or the next day. And I wanted to investigate the effects, whether horses suffered from jet lag and whether we could do anything about it by adjusting the lighting of the horses before they travel.

So it was a very complicated question at the time. Do horses suffer from jet lag? Because first of all, you’ve got to go, what measure of the circadian clock can you measure in a horse? And of course, it’s much easier to do this research with small rodents where you can take lots of samples. You can control the light dark cycle by turning the switch on and off in boxes.

It’s a little harder to do in horses. And 1st we had to actually find, does the horse have a normal circadian rhythm? Does it have these genes that are called clock genes? And that sent me down through my PhD research was to find the clock jeans in the horse and show that they were turned on and off rhythmically, just like they were in every other species, and therefore could be impacted by jet lag. And that’s what got me into that whole field of how powerful light can be.

And one of the other key things was that having attended lots of conferences related to the body clock and rhythms, what was coming out back in the early 2000s was that the most important light for our body to keep it in synchrony with the environment is blue light and blue light simply because sunlight is highest in blue wavelengths of light. So when we think about light is white, light is made-up of all the colours of the visible spectrum. When they come together they make white, but why the sky is blue on a sunny day is because the sun is producing more blue light and it’s scatters and it makes the sky look blue and it’s also the type of light that our body uses to give it. The message of the sun has come up, it’s time to be active, the sun has gone down, there’s no light, it’s time to rest. So that’s a long winded explanation as to how I got interested in lighting, jet lag and very reproductive cycles.

Interesting. There’s so many ways we could go, but I feel like blue light is one of those kind of divisive topics right now because everyone’s we need to limit our blue light exposure, blue light glasses. When I was reading up on this and that your technology mostly uses blue light, I was interested in kind of your relationship with blue versus red and how you know. All of that. I’m really happy you bring that up because poor old blue light gets a very bad rap.

But it’s not. It’s the timing of exposure to it. So if you are living outdoors like a cow in a field, a horse, a pasture, you get huge amounts of blue light from dawn until just before dusk, OK. And then the light wavelengths change and go to an orangey ready glow and then the absence of it usually most close to darkness at night. And our issue with blue light is we have reversed that in our 24 hour society where we have light bulbs and we have LED screens that give us light at the wrong time of day.

So all of the really good life hacks about getting good sleep and how to be alert during the day talk about getting an hour of natural light in the morning or during the day. Because unfortunately we work in offices with fluorescent lights, with incandescent bulbs, and every type of light fixture gives a different set of wavelengths. So it’s the colour temperature. So anything that looks orangey or yellow is not stimulating to your system as a blue light. But then we come home from work, we get into our car, we drive home and then we sit in front of a big TV with blue LED screens, or we look at our phone or we look at our laptops.

So blue light is bad when looked at after dusk because that is when your body wants to produce melatonin, which is the sleep hormone, which is only produced in the absence of blue light. And during the daytime, you want to get as much of it as you can, avoid looking directly at the sun. We have this huge evidence that shows that seasonal affective disorder, depression, a lot of mental health disorders can be ameliorated by having light boxes. So blue light blockers are great if you have to do work on a screen late at night after the sun has gone down. They are not a good idea during the day at all.

So it’s the timing of blue light and you mentioned red light. So the reason I got interested in red light is when we were developing the Equiloom products and using blue light masks and we can talk about the stable light and how that works. As we were finding that particularly in stable to competition horses, there’s always a necessity to interact with the horses after dusk. We’re either working late in the barn or you’re coming in and your race horses get fed in the early hours of the morning way before the work riders come in. A lot of competition horses, the more often you feed them, the better it is for their health.

So staggering that time requires going in, turning on lights, throwing in the feed. And every time you turn on a white light or an orangey light or any sort of that has white in it or blue in it, you immediately turn off the hormone that controls rest, growth and regeneration in horses, which is melatonin. So the interesting thing about red light is the receptors in our eyes and in all mammalian eyes that are controlling our body clock, controlling melatonin, are really sensitive to blue light, which is on the left side of the spectrum, it’s short wavelength light. Red light is on the other side of the light spectrum and it’s long wavelength light. And the receptors that control melatonin don’t pay any attention to it.

They don’t see it, they don’t react to it. So we did a set of studies at UCD to see what intensity and level of red light could we use to be have the same effect on horses, hormone levels as keeping them in the dark. So that meant if we could find the right level of red light, you could go into them at night time. If there was a red light on, they wouldn’t be disturbed. Their body clock wouldn’t be jet lagged, it wouldn’t be shifted, they wouldn’t have the stress response.

And that has been hugely important. So because we even as a competition barns when people go away and they stay for big competitions, you can’t control the lights and it has such a powerful effect on the body and all of the different. I can tell you a little bit about circadian rhythms, but that’s why red light is, if is optimal at night time. If you cannot absolutely guarantee darkness. If you cannot, like if you imagine horses at pasture, there is no light going to come on over them.

The sun doesn’t come suddenly up in the middle of the, they’re fine. But if they’re in a stable and you can’t guarantee that someone isn’t going to turn on a light, that light should be red or it should be. They should be blocked from being able to see it. So that’s the area that we’re trying to go to improve health and Wellness in stable horses. Interesting, and this might be a little off kilter, but is there a difference with quality of light?

Like I’m assuming being outside in the sun is different than looking at the blue light on your phone. Is that just because one is artificial or is it? Does it matter? It’s about the amount of blue light, OK. Because if you go outside, if we measure light in a term called lux, the lux level, and if you I have a little lux meter and I’ll go outside and on a sunny day, it’ll be more than 50,000 lux.

It’s bright, you squint, you have to wear sunglasses. Decent offices would be about 3 to 400 lux. It’s a lot less, but the wavelength composition of that light matters, and a fluorescent tube versus an incandescent bulb versus an LED. So LED’s generally have more blue in them. OK.

And when it comes to the intensity, we’ve managed to do all of the effects on the echoing hormone hormonal production in the body using only 50 locks of blue light to one eye. So you’re targeting the receptors that control the body clock. It’s not about targeting our ability to give light to see because there’s two reasons our eyes need light for vision and for rhythm. And the rhythm is so that all of the organs work together. So the quality of the light is important and we can actually look at the spectrum of light that might be in most stables.

And from a lot of the visits I’ve done to farms in general, stables are quite dark. And one of the things that we do, which we don’t realize is we go and we interact with our horses in the morning and then maybe we have to go off to work for the day, turn the lights off in the stable. Like just because horses don’t have to work at a laptop, they don’t have to read papers or do anything, they still need light for their body and for their health. So if they’re not getting enough natural light from stable windows, those artificial lights should be there to ensure they’re getting enough. And then we come back in the evening.

I’m in a collaborative project with Hartbury University in the United Kingdom and we wanted to find out because we’ve done a lot of research on the effects of lighting on sleep behaviour in horses and stabled horses. And we wanted to find out what do people do in practice and what do they understand about what’s best for their horse. So we asked them a statement, Do you believe that correctly controlled lighting is important for your horse’s sleep? And everyone said yes. Then we asked do you believe that correctly controlled lighting is important to keep your horse’s body clock and internal rhythms working functionally?

Again, they all said yes, but then we asked what? We gave them a selection of questions as to what type of lights they use in their barn, and over 80% of them said they use lights randomly on and off throughout day and night. So it completely disagreed with their perception of what they wanted for their horse and what they actually did. And we found out of like nearly 300 respondents, 52% of them use white light at night to check on their horse. So there’s a huge amount of education needed because people are just only starting to become aware of how powerful light could be.

Yeah. And it’s interesting because I remember working for a trainer a long time ago, and he was a firm believer that we should keep the lights off in the barn during the day because he wanted the forces to stay relaxed. And to him, that because like, I’m sure like, I don’t like having a big light on when I’m at the house. And I think he thought the same thing. So is there a correlation between not just necessarily the hormonal side of things, but for the temperament side of things with light and how that affects, you mentioned cortisol, which is stress.

And the stress response there is from abruptly shifting the light from dark to white at night. Okay, that is a stressful response because horses eyes aren’t very good at acclimatizing quickly between darkness and light. It’s if you look at adventures the most difficult fences are the ones that are going in or out of a shaded area. Light at night is just disruptive. Let me ask, if you see herd of horses at pasture on a sunny day, do they look?

Stressed. Now they’re lounging out in the. Sun, blue light. What it does is it suppresses melatonin. So melatonin, while it’s important Forrest, it’s the reason why humans get seasonal affective disorder and where the clouds roll in Ireland at the start of autumn and they sit around your forehead a weeks on end.

It’s grey and you’re getting up in the dark. You’re going to work in the dark, you’re coming back. That means that melatonin never gets a chance to drop completely. If you look at how melatonin is made in the body, one is the hormone that’s the precursor to how it’s made is serotonin, which is considered the happiness hormone, right? So if you suppress melatonin, it means there’s more serotonin around so you’re in a better mood.

OK. And we have seen the same true with horses. A lot of the research that I do looks at a specific quantifiable trait. Is the mere cycling or not? Is the hair shedding out quickly or not?

Is the testosterone level higher in stallions? We look at distinct parameters. One of the things that we hear from our research, you know, collaborators and the owners of these horses, is the first thing they notice is behaviour is improved. Horses that are difficult, that are fidgety, that have possibly in some cases, stereotypic behaviours. They are vastly improved because now instead of being in their dark stable all day, in between their exercise routines, they have a little blue light on their eye or they have a stable light with blue light and it improves their mood.

We do the same with humans. The treatment for seasonal affective disorder is to look at a bright light box. You can actually get little blue light glasses that put blue light on your eyelids. So I was doing it to so many horses, I thought I’d better take my own medicine. It really does help on those dark mornings, half an hour of just blue light and it resets your body clock and it means that later that night you’ll sleep better, which is also really important for our overall health and well-being in those of our horses.

Yeah, that’s funny. Do you ever uncover something and you go and I could use that for myself? There was a time when the ladies that used to run brothels in the Middle Ages and later than that knew that lighting could change the behaviour of their clientele. It’s where the term the red light district came from. Low red light would come, whereas a bright.

Imagine walking into a supermarket stimulated by bright lights because they want to alert, but you’re also they weren’t you in good mood so you’d spend more money and it is it. But it also we found that if you want horses to perform best during the day, they should be alert at that. They should be happy, alert about business, and then in the evening time, that is the time when naturally they would regenerate, repair and rest. So you are this researcher, lecturer, out of college, university. How do you then start equilon?

With a lot of time and a lot of peers and a lot of. So I was lucky in that when I joined the university, there was a big push for academics to be innovators, and I’m a big believer in translating science into actual practical changes that are going to benefit the industry. What is the point otherwise? So all of these years of research and when I started looking at blue light, the first thing was I think this should be something that we could use for the industry. And it’s no point just writing it on a paper.

You actually have to build a prototype and go look. You can put blue light on a horse’s head because everyone said no, you can’t. The amount of nose that you have to overcome. But if you believe it’s like, why not we put blinkers, racing blinkers on horses going around the track at 50 kilometers an hour or more? Why can’t we put a single blinker over 1 and have the same effect as standing them in the stable all night?

You have to apply for patents to protect your idea in order for it to be potentially commercial. And I applied for grants to commercialize it, to commercialize the science and try to think about how would I go out and set up a business. It was a very steep learning curve. It continues. But then when you show something works, that’s fine, but then you kind of convince the markets that they might need it because it’s disruptive.

It’s like, why would, especially in the horse industry, why would we change what we’re doing? We’ve been doing it for generations and who’s this young Irish one with blue lights and wanted to stick them on horses heads and I got that and actually you need to get enough people to try it and go damn, that worked, that actually worked. I didn’t have to bring the mares in and they’re cycling in time for the breeding shed and it saved me money on bedding, electricity and labour. And the horses are healthier too, which is why I did it in the first place. It was a low Rd.

Samantha, to be honest, and I’m glad I embarked on it. We’re 14 years in. But what it The great thing about it is I constantly do more research using lice. So through the help from the company, I can do the research that I really want to do and then in turn I can integrate that with my teaching and show students you can do this too. Identify a problem, use your studies, use the science.

And there’s no reason why you can’t make changes in the industry. If you believe in something enough and you know that it works. And yeah, it’s then about getting the right team around you, getting people who also believe in it. The thing that I think helped me the most is I worked very closely with the stud farms. I got feedback.

I was like, this has to be, it’s not just the managers or the vets, it’s the staff, it’s the people who work day in, day out, bringing mares, horses in and out of fields. They’re the ones that have to put this headpiece on, They’re the ones that will see issues with the design. They’re the ones who have to go looking for it in the paddock when it falls off. So getting them to say, how can I do this better? And then when they realized that their comments were directly improving it, I think they felt a little bit part of the process and that that was really important, I think.

But from there, obviously when we saw the benefits that it was having for horses, we now realize there’s all these horses that aren’t lucky enough to live outdoors all the time. They’re not in a breeding herd. These are competition animals. They get to spend 22 hours a day, probably in a stable. How can we bring the benefits of nature’s light inside?

And that’s when the study on the red light at night and using LED’s that best mimic what sunlight produces and developing a light that then allows them to have natural light cycles that’s on a timer so nobody can mess it up by turning lights on. So the aquarium stable light does that and it allows the horses to be a lot more in tune within their body and with the environment. And we’ve seen great benefits for that in a lots of different types of horses in different disciplines. So why is the eyes important for light versus just like skin or fur? The only place that a mammal has photoreceptors is in the back of the retina.

So whereas light on the skin can help with vitamin D production, but the only place where we absorb light because there’s a direct neuronal connection. So there’s little neurons that fire when light hits the eye. And if it’s blue light, it takes the message to the part of the brain called the master clock. It’s a part of the hypothalamus and it in there, it’s waiting for the message. And then all of these neurons fire with a 24 hour rhythm.

And this information is sent, transmitted throughout the body through more neurons and through hormone products like melatonin. And it tells every single organ what time of day it is. And that means that the liver will turn on genes that are important for it. The bone will turn on different genes at different times. And that’s how our Physiology works.

And we showed this beautifully in the study we did about 10 years ago now where we changed the lighting over race horses in a selection, a group of race horses. So they were under these fluorescent lights that the feed guy would come around at 5:00 in the morning, turn the lights on, turn in the feed sometimes, turn the light back off, sometimes not. They would be in a stable all day. They do their racing or their work writing in the morning. And we looked at where can we evaluate whether their body clock is working well.

And the great thing about the body clock is every single cell in our body has a rhythm. And I can take hair samples from the main and look at the DNA that is turned on and off in that hair. And if you collected every two to three hours and you look at these genes, you can see they have a lovely wave like pattern showing a rhythm if the body clock is getting the right signal. When we took it in these race horses that were stabled under fluorescent lights, we found that these rhythms were flat lined. There was no rhythm there.

When we change the lighting so that they got blue enriched light by day and it switched gradually to red light at night, we put in a 20 minute transition because the sun doesn’t drop out of the sky at 6:00, there is a twilight. So we try to replicate that for the state horse. Transition up, transition down. And what we found was after a couple of weeks, we take those samples again and those horses now showed a rhythm in their hair, their hair sample. And my point of taking hair number one, it’s non invasive.

You can take, you can not all of them like having their hair, their main pulls, but we’re only taking about 10 hairs at a time. If we take hair, it’s an indicator of what’s happening throughout the body. So what’s happening in muscle, in heart, in lung tissue, all of the stuff that’s important for performance horses, OK, Or for just health in general? We know strongly in human health, the stronger your body clock, so the more natural light you’re getting by day, the more darkness there are, red light and rest you’re getting at night, the healthy you are. It’s reducing, reduces cancer, reduces diabetes.

A lot of our disorders that are of primary concern in the world now, related to obesity and diabetes and mental health, are caused by disruptions in our circadian rhythm. The way we’re working, the way we’re watching screens, the way we’re eating at different times. The more you can regulate that in tune with a 24 hour rhythm, the better your health is. And I’m trying to show that it’s the same for our horses. Interesting.

When you’re initially getting into this, you had this kind of mares and stallions and just the light affect them the same? Or are they inherently like women are just different overall than men, but do you notice the same sort of benefits in them? No, I understand your question and yes the answer is yes. Any Organism that evolved on our planet that has been subject to 4 1/2 billion years of a rotating planets with light dark cycles basically has these clock genes that do the same thing in our body. Now there are specific sex differences in maybe the timing of when things peak during the time of day.

And of course when we look at stallions, see there’s two different types of rhythms and I don’t want to complicate it or it’s more than two, but I don’t want to complicate it too much. But when it comes to horses have a very strong 24 hour rhythm called a circadian rhythm, but they also have a very profound circa annual rhythm or yearly rhythm in reproduction, in hair coat, in muscle development, in growth, in lactation. So because they’re seasonal breeding animals, so light, the quality of the light and the similarity of the light dark cycle every single day is really important for the circadian rhythm. But the duration of light that they get at a specific time of year controls whether their reproductive hormones are being activated and their lactation hormone. And in mares and stallions, that will differ.

So stallions will produce more testosterone, mares will produce more estrogen and progesterone and that. But the actual effects on the circadian rhythm are very similar. So there aren’t really huge differences in the horses. So a lot of the benefits for health and for behaviour would be the same in both genders. Interesting.

Yeah, I know with looking into like, human health, you realize just how different men and women internally are. And so it’s always interesting looking at the four side of things because I do think horses and humans are oddly similar despite being so different. So why a mask? Like, I understand in terms of probably being able to keep it on, but why is this something that they wear all day? Is it something that just gets put on for a short period of time and then take it off once you know the sun comes up?

How does it work in practice? So in practice it was initially designed for the mayors that were living outside, so to try and avoid the need to bring them in at 4:00 and leave the lights on till 11:00 for example. So in that case, those masks are worn outside all the time, but the light only comes on at 4:00 PM. So when it’s once it’s activated for your mare or your horse living outdoors, it comes on at 4:00 because they’re already getting the benefit of nature’s light until the 4:00. All we’re doing then is we’re extending day length by 7 hours.

And the great thing is everywhere in the world they breed horses. It’s still fairly bright at half three, 4:00. So when the light comes on, it just continues the day length and we could have one-size-fits-all, there’s No 2 sizes. But with regard to how the method worked. But then when we started seeing all these benefits for mares and breeders saying, Oh my God, their coats look amazing, they’re dappled, their behaviours changed, they’re all these things.

We have stabled horses that are oftentimes not. You can’t control the quality of the light in the stable. So we developed what we call a pro mask for the Stables competition leisure horse, where the light comes on at 8:00 AM and turns off at 11:00 PM. Now you can take off the mask if you’re exercising. If the horse gets turned out, it’s only when they’re in the stable or you’re not going to be around to make sure the light turns off.

So a lot of people would take it off once a day to exercise and to if they were on turn out time and then they put it on again. It’s about the consistency and that’s the word that was evading me earlier, the consistency of the lighting on a daily basis. And if you’re trying to use a mask to say improve your forces, show coach earlier in the season that you don’t want to clip. You want them looking good in the end of February or whenever it is you want. And you would start the lighting two to three months beforehand, usually only take six weeks to shed out a coat.

But it is when you put on the, it’s 15 hours of blue light. And then by the time summer comes, you might not need it for May, June and July. The unless you’re bringing them in and you’re worried about their light exposure. But if they’re getting good natural light, they might need it all the time. But we have a lot of people who will use it all the time and only take it off when they exercise.

And of course, we’ve had a lot of revisions of the mask to improve comfort and to make sure it doesn’t rob anywhere. And they’ll always be one or two words and scratch it in a certain way. But it’s pretty padded. It seems to be very comfortable on them and they’re not bothered by it unless they have some underlying really irritable condition that they don’t like anything on their face. But in general, we have not had issues in that regard, which is really great.

So what’s the iteration process look like? So you develop a product and you’re when you are talking patents, is it just the technology or is it the thing overall? It can be both. It can be the method of using the technology and the actual way the technology is incorporated into a device. OK, so there’s a patent speak and writing is a whole.

You’d want another PhD just on that. And thankfully I work with some really smart people who do have PhDs. But it is, yeah, I mean, and the only people can get around path. And it was just when you have a really novel idea and you’ve pushed years and years of research and funding into, it’s nice to have a couple of years where you’re the only one in the market and people think, oh, it’s it’s expensive. It’s like you don’t know how much it cost to actually develop and do the research.

You’re paying for the whole and all the salaries of the people that went into helping you to get there. But the iteration is once you have an idea and you’ve done a little bit of research and you haven’t told many people about it. And before you write anything down, you file a preliminary patent application. Just say, here’s my idea here, all the possible things that it might work for. And then later on that’ll be Co hacked away and they’ll go, no, you can’t have this.

You can’t have this claim, but maybe we’ll allow you have this and you can still do all that and you could be right about to have a patent granted and somebody will oppose you and say, no, I don’t think this is a novel idea. I want to challenge you on that because I want to make my own 1. So it’s, it’s not for them. Life ain’t hearted, but not everything needs a patent. Good.

Once you have developed a, a brand that people respect, they know that you put science behind what you do in this industry. If you produce something and you say it does something and it doesn’t do it, you’ll find out pretty fast. The only people who managed to get away from that, I think are all the supplement companies because you, it’s so hard to prove a supplement actually work because you can’t do the level of controlled trials and there’s so many variables. But like they have a little bit more free range. But when you say anything else, if you say your horse’s coach is going to be shinier and shorter, if you use this and it’s not, believe me, the person grooming that horse is going to know and will not buy your product anymore.

And yeah. So what else can I say about the iteration? And you have an idea. You probably have to do a few tests to see if it’s going to work. And then you have to create a prototype and do proof of concept kind of study.

Will this actually work on more than two or three horses? Can I put it on 20 mares and will it do it? And can I show statistically it works? Then you need to get the leaders in your field. Who people?

Look up to and respect to also believe that you’re doing something. And when it comes to a scientific product, you have to publish it in scientific papers. And that’s where my role as an academic has really helped the company because I’m a scientist first, an entrepreneur second, and I’ll always be the scientist. They took me off, take me away from sales, because what I’m good at is showing that it worked. Trying to figure out what will be the next thing that we can work on.

Yeah, there’s so much that goes into just developing. A little while ago I was trying to work on. I love fashion and writing, so I was like, let’s look into developing fringe. But I was like, there’s got to be a camel toe proof breach. You start with a product and then you get that product and you’re like, this could be so much better in this area and this area.

And then you have to go back and readjust and there’s so much communication and nuance and OK, I like it. Is anyone else going to like it? Deal which is exciting and stressful and all of the things. And if you have that mindset, you can always make something better. It’s never done except the investors are going to go, no, you’re done.

We need to do the market. You just stop. And it’s like, what if we tweak this? Yeah, exactly. You take it so personally when someone reports that, oh, my horse had a slight loss of hair on the side of their face for the Velcro on them.

Oh, no, we messed up. No, Barbara, that was one in 10,000 stuffed. It’s OK, But you do it is. Yeah, it’s a very involved process. And it’s like the hardest part for me at the start was it was not the technology.

I show the blue light had this amazing effect, just one eye. They don’t need both. And a lot of people ask me why is it only to one eye? And I’m like, would you let your expensive competition mayor outside? But like shining on both their eyes?

And then they go, oh, yeah. Because they have such lateral vision, like one eye doesn’t impede their ability to see. And only that. I had ridden schoolmasters that only had one eye. Horses that were just had a single eye and they could see perfectly.

They had amazing ability to see where they were going. So I knew it would be OK. But it was the hardest part was getting the damn thing to stay on and keeping it clean. Yeah, horses are destructive and people like when they lie down. We were wondering why does this thing, why is the cop keep getting squished?

When a horse gets up from lying down last, it uses its head to push its body up, to push itself off the ground. And that’s a huge amount of weight that we had. It was very interesting developing the size and the shape and how it would fit and then how you could get one shape to fit lots of breed sizes. Yeah, it continues. Do you see happening in the next 5 or 10 years either in this circadian rhythm side of things or even just in in any part of your research or anything at all that you’re excited about?

I am excited for hopefully people’s awareness being raised about the importance of light and about the absence, the need for the absence of light at night time. So I really like because we, I started out looking to get horses to stay out at pasture more for the breeding stock in this breeding industry. I think we’ve achieved that, but it’s all the horses who spend most of their lives indoors. Can we make their life better and more natural and people go, oh, you’re putting lights on their head, how’s that more natural? We’re substituting for what we’ve taken away and it does impact their well-being in their body.

I’m also really excited that I get to collaborate with some great researchers both in England and in the United States. I have a couple of big grants with Texas A&M who have great resources, and we’re going to start looking at how we can potentially see if circadian disruption is a contributor to metabolic syndrome in horses to obesity. Interest. Insulin dysregulation and all. Was that because again, judging by the results of our survey, people are not respecting or understanding how lighting is playing such an important part?

If it’s causing obesity and diabetes and cardiovascular issues in humans because of circadian disruption and we have metabolic syndrome being such a huge problem in our equine friend, then what can we do and can we show that there’s a link there and can we help improve it by improving the lighting? So that’s where my research and interest is going. And it all again leads back to trying to get to stable tors healthier. Raising awareness and educating or sonar’s is a huge part of it. So I appreciate being able to talk to you on this podcast.

Yeah, I know this has been so informational. Like I personally, my fiance does tech for a living, so I’m constantly at him about he’ll be up until 1:00 in the morning looking at his computer and I’m like, is your night shift light on and are you doing all of this stuff? And he’s, he actually struggles with gaining weight and I am like convinced it has to do with this. His body is just all screwed up. So I definitely will be interested in following the metabolic research that you’re doing as well.

And I’ve just recently discovered that it’s probably because of the light coming into the eyes. That tells me that her optic nerve is actually severed. It doesn’t have any because what happens in the absence of light cues to entrain or to ‘cause these rhythms to stay In Sync with the environment, they free run. And so the shedding rhythm will be out of sync and it might be slightly longer or shorter, but it doesn’t happen at the right time and that is all. So she’s not getting.

You definitely know that she has no light reception. She only has one eye, I don’t know for certain but she has uveitis so she spends most of her time in the UV8. Her mask, maybe even with a secondary fly mask, which I’m actually thinking of like her and, and I mean my horse is she lives out 24/7, but I just think being able to take off one of the fly masks to allow more light into that one eye maybe would be helpful. Yeah. I mean, unfortunately natural sunlight has the UN, whereas the blue light when people say, oh, I don’t, I have no research evidence suggesting that it’s going to improve or disapprove forces with UVI.

But if it’s UV related, there’s no UV in the blue light masks. It’s very interesting. So a really interesting experiment of n = 1 would be if she had a heavy winter coach and you wanted to see if it had an effect, you would use a mask in December, January for six weeks. See if she sheds. If she sheds that there is the the the receptors for blue light are actually being stimulation.

Interesting. Yeah, No, it’s always worth giving stuff a shot. And I’m like, we’re living in such a cool time where technology is helping horses, even blind horses or horses that have extensive rehab things have just better quality of life overall. So I think, yeah, it just very eye opening. Thank you so much for joining me.

How do people follow along with what you do? All of that good stuff. We there’s the Equiloom website www.equiloomequilume.com and I’m pretty sure we’re on Facebook and Instagram and all of that. If anyone has any specific queries for me, you can get me at barbara@equiloom.com. I’m always interested to hear from people with their case studies and happy to help if I can suggest how something might help.

Awesome. Thanks so much. You’re welcome.