How One Horse Changed the Lives of Thousands of Horses - Timmy's Story

Then, more people got to know about this and asked me what was on Timmy’s nose… Although it was quite subtle, which I liked. The design also allowed saliva to escape so it was comfortable to wear, easy to wash and could stay on the bridle all the time, so it was quite easy. I’m always one for keeping things simple, for both horse and owner!

I had someone else on my yard say they also had a horse showing the same behaviour, could I make her a Muzzle Net too… turns out, she was also having lessons with someone who had a Grand Prix horse who was also a horse doing the same thing, could I make them one?

At the time I was working full time in London, coming back every evening and making more and more Muzzle Nets, and I thought, there’s actually more horses showing this behaviour than I realised – I originally felt very isolated because I thought I was one of the few people who had experienced this!

What I decided to do from there was contact the Royal Veterinary College, and they put me in touch with De Montford University and Dr. D. Mills, who was designing a survey to determine if there was a correlation between breeds, ages, background, training, feed, or some sort of pattern of horses across the UK that were showing this head shaking behaviour.

I contacted Dr Mills, and at the time, he and his PHD student Katy Taylor were actually trying to test potential products that might reduce the frequency of the head shaking behaviour. I showed him the Muzzle Net and he said, he thought that actually from the feedback from the panel and observations, he felt the Muzzle Net might have a good chance of helping a lot of horses. It went into the clinical trial and was tested against a number of other products, but the Muzzle Net was the most effective of them all. It didn’t help everybody. But it did indicate that 79% horses showed a decrease in the frequency of the head shaking behaviour. In fact, 50% of the horses showed a 100% improvement, which was incredible.

The reason Horse & Hound had written the article, was because British Dressage had allowed the Muzzle Net to be used in competition, with written dispensation from the vet. It was a break-though!

The letters we’ve had since then to now have been fantastic. We even had one owner in Canada thanking us, saying ‘Thank you for giving me my horse back’, which makes me feel very emotional.