Colt Knight: 00:17
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, Dr. Robert Causey. I do not know Dr. Causey’s official title, but we all call him the horse professor. He runs the horse program here at the University of Maine, and he talks a little funny, so you have to put your listening ears on real closely too.
Colt Knight: 00:55
But you’ve been used to hearing my hillbilly dialect, so his proper British accent should be quite easy to decipher after that.
Robert Causey: 01:03
Somewhat proper. Somewhat? Somewhat slightly improper, but that’s as time goes on.
Colt Knight: 01:09
Robert, it is great to have you on the podcast today.
Robert Causey: 01:12
Delighted to be here, Colt.
Colt Knight: 01:16
Dr. 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.
Colt Knight: 01:27
We both like to drink bourbon. And I guess we’re both professors here at the University of Maine.
Robert Causey: 01:35
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
Colt Knight: 01:43
way up, perhaps. So what is your actual title, and what do you do?
Robert Causey: 01:49
So my title is I am an associate professor in animal and veterinary sciences, which is part of the School of Food and Agriculture. And what I do is I’m a veterinarian, I should add, and got my veterinary degree from Minnesota and a PhD from LSU, and then worked in the vet school also at the University of Florida 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 squalls and stormy weather, so to speak.
Colt Knight: 02:36
Budget cuts.
Robert Causey: 02:37
Budget cuts, and so forth, 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 been a lot of fun. I really enjoy it. And I’m still doing it.
Robert Causey: 02:58
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 it feels great to be up there.
Colt Knight: 03:10
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?
Robert Causey: 03:24
So the way I got to Maine was that it’s kind of a personal story. I was really climbing up the ladder, in retrospect, fairly well by getting a DVM, then a—did an internship—residency, sorry, residency, and a PhD at LSU, and then got board certified in Theriogenology, which is the veterinary reproduction specialty, basically. And, having been a clinical instructor at the University of Florida for two years, I was pretty well set to get a faculty position at a vet school.
Robert Causey: 04:11
Two things brought me to Maine. The first was that a professor here, Jim Weber, was looking for somebody to start a horse program from scratch, basically. It ended up not being quite from scratch, but we could talk about that later. But start a horse program with teaching and research, which was kind of a cool opportunity, in fact, and one could use that and then build 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.
Robert Causey: 04:57
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 here. And so I stayed, with some regrets about them leaving. But as I said, lovely people, like she was and her twin. But I came here by myself.
Robert Causey: 05:20
Having gotten here, one thing that I suddenly had to deal with even before it involved horses was undergraduates as a different kind of student body to veterinary students. And the undergraduates here were, and this is a very good thing, outspoken, independent, had no hesitation about walking up to faculty members or administrators and saying this is what we want to do and have happen. And the prelude to my arriving at UMaine was the students had, three students had gone to the dean, Bruce—Dean Bruce Wiersma, and they said, Dean Wiersma, we don’t think you understand what horses mean to us. And Bruce Wiersma, who had at that time 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 a boarding program, boarding horses up at the farm that students could bring in their horses and board them.
Robert Causey: 06:43
And that created some of the infrastructure that we have up there, mostly the stalls and the paddocks. But also, I did bring horses in, and then very shortly after that, I came along. And my goal, because you can’t really teach and do research with student animals, felt that the best way to approach, from my standpoint, a research and teaching program was to work with the local horse industry, and that big industry was the Maine Standardbred 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.
Robert Causey: 07:31
And Glenn really was a burly mountain kind of a man, and enjoyed muzzle loading rifles and this kind of stuff. They’d go out in roundups and retreat.
Colt Knight: 07:43
One does.
Robert Causey: 07:44
As one does. They’d go out, and they really had a good time with it. And he was very kindly showing me around. The nice thing is people—Glenn and I were so different—we could get along very well.
Robert Causey: 07:54
There was never any sort of competition between us. And he was showing me around Bangor, and we just instantly drove by Bangor Raceway. And the penny dropped, and I suddenly realized we’ve got a Standardbred population up here. And if we’ve a population of racehorses up here, we’ve got a population of people trying to get rid of horses. And so we set up the program, based on my so-called expertise in equine reproduction, to use Standardbred mares donated to the university that basically created the research and teaching herd up here.
Robert Causey: 08:38
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 how you want to call them, but less than 10 years of age. And young animals that were sound and could go on to have a good home. And so in addition to soliciting donations of horses from the local Standardbred industry, I was having a conversation with a woman who some of the audience may recognize the name of, Robin Cuffey, who, sadly, is no longer with us. And Robin wrote the book on retraining the Standardbred horse—literally wrote the book. And she was based down, I think it’s Gorham, Maine.
Robert Causey: 09:32
And I was in a conversation with her, and she said—and this is literally 1998—she said, if you get these ex-racehorses, Standardbreds, and get them into the barn, what you have is the opportunity to retrain them to become pleasure horses, and then you can sell them to generate income for your program.
Colt Knight: 09:59
You know, that’s how I got started in the horse industry.
Robert Causey: 10:02
Go on. I didn’t know your full history, Colt, but I’d be
Colt Knight: 10:06
interested to hear a little bit. I guess the first thing, we had some milk goats that we used 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.
Colt Knight: 10:41
And so I would just put on my Walls coveralls and get on that pony and get bucked off relentlessly until eventually I could ride it.
Robert Causey: 10:48
And how old were you when you would be getting
Colt Knight: 10:50
bucked? Maybe 10 years old, somewhere around in there. My first hat is actually in the studio now, my 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.
Robert Causey: 11:10
I see. You’re the pony.
Colt Knight: 11:11
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.
Colt Knight: 11:18
And then I outgrew the pony. But anyway, we got into a cycle. My dad would go to the livestock auctions and purchase old Standardbred track horses. And at that time, they—you know, a non-broke Standardbred might be $200, $300, whatever the meat pen prices were. Right.
Colt Knight: 11:39
You’d look for those tattoos. You’d look and see if they were pacers or not. We didn’t want the trotters.
Robert Causey: 11:44
You didn’t want the trotters.
Colt Knight: 11:45
No, we wanted the pacing horses.
Robert Causey: 11:47
Can I ask why?
Colt Knight: 11:48
Because you could teach the pacers to rack the majority of the time. So you could have a really smooth—so this is a pleasure horse.
Robert Causey: 11:56
This is sort of your, correct me if I’m wrong, but your sort of cheap version of a gaited horse. Yes. Like a Tennessee Walker or something.
Colt Knight: 12:01
Yeah. Well, I came from a very rural, poor part of the country. Fair. So
Colt Knight: 12:07
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 ever thought about having. Absolutely. Yeah. And so, you know, that snowballed and then we were showing Standardbreds and everything.
Colt Knight: 12:33
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 Saddlebreds 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 Standardbreds.
Colt Knight: 13:07
And it was supposed to be a horse show, but it was basically just a controlled wild race, basically. And so anything went. You know, 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.
Colt Knight: 13:26
And you had to keep it kinda close to the rail. You couldn’t cut the corners or anything.
Robert Causey: 13:32
So how many other people had Standardbreds doing this? Was it just you or was it
Colt Knight: 13:37
No. No. Most of the folks around that part of the world were riding Standardbreds or racking horses. At the time, you could commission a Standardbred a racking horse.
Robert Causey: 13:47
Okay.
Colt Knight: 13:48
Prior to that, they wouldn’t commission a Standardbred. But everybody lied about it. So those lip tattoos they put in Standardbreds, 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
Colt Knight: 14:17
where I came from, but most of them were all just Standardbreds.
Colt Knight: 14:17
But anyway, that’s how I got into the
Robert Causey: 14:19
The Standardbreds are great horses. We could never have set up the program we did here, I feel, with Thoroughbreds. 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 beginning students, Standardbreds were going to work and Thoroughbreds probably wouldn’t have worked.
Colt Knight: 14:43
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 who 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. We 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.
Colt Knight: 15:14
And so we were constantly training them, putting that drive into them to race.
Robert Causey: 15:19
Interesting.
Colt Knight: 15:20
Yep. Yeah. And it was
Robert Causey: 15:22
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 very much a different experience. But that told me 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.
Colt Knight: 16:00
Yep.
Robert Causey: 16:01
And just hot-walking Thoroughbreds around the barn after they’ve been exercising was, in a strange way, the real basis of horse handling. And just putting the chain over the nose, you know? You had to be very careful and sensible how you did it and all that sort of stuff. The Thoroughbred industry was probably one of the best places to learn everything that a horse could do. And again, I consider that for me a foundational experience. It really was.
Colt Knight: 16:37
But getting back to the horse program here at the University of Maine, so you found a local trainer to work with.
Robert Causey: 16:44
We, yeah, we went with—
Colt Knight: 16:45
Standardbreds.
Robert Causey: 16:46
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 is her name. And she ultimately just jumped straight in and established the Standardbred drill team, in fact.
Robert Causey: 17:15
And so probably in 1999, we dragged out onto the Bangor Raceway somewhere between ten and fifteen Standardbreds with students on them. And they did a drill in front of the stands, and nobody got hurt. And we got the horses out there, we got the horses back, and we were very lucky. But that’s what we did. And so Sandy Welsh was our first trainer, and then she went off to do other things.
Robert Causey: 17:48
And then we had Jan Hartwell for several years. And Jan is probably very broad but a little more Western. She has some Western background, but she did a great job. Then she left, and we hired Cassie Astell in about 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 taking care of the students and the horses up until now.
Robert Causey: 18:31
And most recently, we have Haley Stroud, who is continuing to help us with the Standardbreds and all that sort of stuff. So we’ve had some—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 here.
Robert Causey: 19:00
In terms of great horse industry people, I do need to give a shout out to Valerie Grondin and the harness—well, first, 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, Alk—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 Standardbreds in New Holt in New Jersey. And he was all into us having a racehorse. So we got donated a Standardbred racehorse named Venus of Milo.
Robert Causey: 19:46
Donated to us by Tom Cole, who was, at that time, the executive director of the Maine Harness Racing Promotions Board. He had just been—I think 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.
Robert Causey: 20:08
And we had then a horse racing at Bangor Raceway, and we have had a horse racing at Bangor Raceway from 1999 through 2010, 2011, or 2012, I think, was the final time with Wideout, Pembroke Wideout. But that got us involved with the harness racing industry. And one of our hugest supporters and advisers to this was Don Marean, who some people will know about. He’s with the United States Trotting Association, one of the leaders of the USTA 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 want to hear about research or not, but
Robert Causey: 21:04
Yeah.
Robert Causey: 21:04
Lay it on us. Lay it on you. So one of my—what’s the word I’m looking for—principles or things that I try to live by as someone that works with horses and teaches and does research is, as much as possible, do things that do not hurt the animal or do not compromise the animal. And that’s so that the animal, the horse, could then go to a good owner and not be damaged, but basically be—if the horse was at the farm, at the Witter Center where we raised them, the horses would be improved over time.
Robert Causey: 21:46
So we did that, and we had that trainer. And we did 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.
Robert Causey: 22:22
And you 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 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.
Robert Causey: 22:58
So bottom line is, as far as a pregnant mare 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 R—, 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 were running before you got pregnant, keep running as long as you can.
Robert Causey: 23:27
Just keep doing the things that you did before. So we showed that exercise for a pregnant mare is probably better than not exercising. So we’re glad we did that. It 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 cardiovascularly capable of doing it and also have the muscular tone, maybe what we would call a core strength, to do it as well.
Robert Causey: 23:57
So exercising a pregnant mare 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 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 nose. And a lot of us may have had the COVID vaccine through the nose—I’m trying to remember the COVID vaccine now. It’s been so long, but there might have been an intranasal version of it. And, by creating a mucosal immunity—mucosal meaning the mucus surface of the gut and the lungs and the reproductive tract—if you inoculate one part of the mucosal system, you can essentially have that mucosal immunity transferred to the others. So we put this vaccine up, basically aerosolized it up into the nose, and we created an antibody response in the uterus to that 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.
Robert Causey: 25:29
So it was a really nice, really in some respects a pilot study because there were so few mares in the challenge group. But a nice way of looking at the possibility that vaccinating in the nose could create an immune response in the uterus in the horse. And I was really pleased with that. It was actually funded by the USDA. So big thanks to them back in the early two thousands.
Robert Causey: 25:54
And then the other research project that I’m pleased with involved—and there have been a few others—but the other one that I’m most pleased with was looking at the mucosal surface of the uterus. I noticed when I was at 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?
Robert Causey: 26:32
And gradually, through a prolonged 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 to what happens in the respiratory tract, in the nasal cavity and bronchi. 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 basically out the vaginal opening. And 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 nasty immune cells come in and squirt things that kill things.
Robert Causey: 27:43
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 we were able to take endoscopes and put them into a horse, and we watched these currents moving, of the movement of things coming out of the uterus. And with these high magnification endoscopes, we could literally see red blood cells moving through capillaries in the endometrium. It was pretty amazing.
Robert Causey: 28:23
We were really focusing on the cervix because the cervix is loaded with cilia. And there’s a very famous theriogenologist, equine reproductive expert named Oleg Ginther, who 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 folds that increase the effectiveness of the cilia by basically making sure there’s not a lot of free space above the cilia, but there are these channels that sweep stuff out. And so that was the research I’ve done fairly recently.
Robert Causey: 29:07
When I say my age, recently is the last ten years. And then finally, perhaps—and there’s many things that I’ve been doing—but the other thing that we also did with a student named Victoria Sorrentino was to look at the ability of forage. We have to increase mastication in horses by adding—from Lucerne Farms—we get 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.
Robert Causey: 29:53
By generating more buffer, it protects the stomach, so it reduces ulcers if you’re feeding grain.
Colt Knight: 30:00
So does that have any effect on the teeth if they chew more? Like, do you have to float their teeth as often?
Robert Causey: 30:07
That’s a really good question. I don’t know the answer to that. I suspect not too much because if they’re chewing more, sure, 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 I guess we just have to live with the dental aspect of it and make sure that we stay ahead of annual dental exams and stuff like that.
Robert Causey: 30:50
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.
Colt Knight: 31:00
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 prospects or hopes or
Robert Causey: 31:14
Future prospects and hopes. Private funding helps us a lot. So anybody that wants to donate to the equine program, feel free. 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 want to try to maintain so the students can have a good hands-on experience. And I don’t know whether I mentioned this or not.
Robert Causey: 31:47
We want these students to go to vet school. And even if they do not become equine practitioners—I kind of hope they do, but if they don’t—this equine experience at the Witter Center 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 for a pre-vet student because you deal with them on an individual basis.
Robert Causey: 32:17
There are 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—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 want to go to vet school because we really dig in and help them with that.
Colt Knight: 32:44
Well, Dr. Causey, it was great to have you on the podcast.
Robert Causey: 32:46
Oh, it’s great to
Colt Knight: 32:47
meet. We appreciate you sitting down and giving us this history lesson.
Robert Causey: 32:51
My pleasure. My pleasure.
Colt Knight: 32:53
This is the first time I’ve heard the history of the horse program here. So I
Robert Causey: 32:57
learned a lot. Good. And
Colt Knight: 32:59
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@maine.edu. Oh, that busted gut when he said…
Robert Causey: 33:24
That? So a wicky—it’s like that’s what’s—yeah. No. No.
Robert Causey: 33:34
Occasionally, they do. Mhmm. And you’ve probably seen it yourself.
Colt Knight: 33:37
Oh, yeah. Yeah. I was on foal watch for a long time on some of those farms that I worked at.