Hello, it's Anthony Chadwick for the webinar vet welcoming you to another episode of the UK's top veterinary podcast. It's Vet Chats. And we're very fortunate today to have Robin Smith on the phone.

Robin is a product design engineer. Now you may ask why have we got a product design engineer on the podcast, and you will find out as we move forward. Robin is the CEO and founder of Numbnuts.

It probably does exactly what it says on the tin. It's an interesting situation because of course remembering my time as a large animal vet and also as a student, you probably remember how lambs were castrated very early using rubber rings, which were, Painful, they looked uncomfortable, the lamb seemed to take a time to settle down, and I think the work that's come on since then has shown that this is, You know, an uncomfortable way obviously to perform that particular procedure. So Robin has been looking at how he can solve that problem, has been having great success with it in Australia.

And and so I wanted to bring him on cos I think it's very interesting from a welfare perspective that this is an area that we should look at. But perhaps before we dive right into the product, Robin, tell us a little bit about your history, cos of course you've got a famous dad who is a vet as well, haven't you? That's right.

Hello, and hello everyone and on the, the vet podcast. Yes, so I am, a product design engineer. I'm the black sheep of the family.

Both, both my grandfather and father were vets. My grandfather, spent his time as a, as a government vet in, in Kenya back in the 1950s and 1960s, looking after large animals and farms on behalf of the, what was the British government. It was a colony, I guess, back then.

My dad grew up in Kenya. He, graduated from Glasgow Uni and, I think spent about 3 months in practise and and realised his bedside manner was, was not great with the humans in the room and moved into to research at the Morden Research Institute. His, his life's work then became, he became a parasitologist, and his life's work was, looking at the, the barber's pole worm, the homuncuous worm, and, he ended up developing a product called Barber vax, which is, I think the world's first vaccine for any gut dwelling parasite in any mammal.

And Barber vax was developed out of modern research. It's a, it's a parasite that's largely prevalent in, in Australia, particularly around the places where it has rainy summers, wet summers on a place called Armidale in New England. They were having huge losses of sheep to Barbara's pole worm, which is a nasty parasite.

Once it takes hold, sheep become anaemic and die very quickly. So yeah, that was, that was Dad's dad's background, and, and he launched that in 2014, . In order to actually facilitate making that, he he needed to call upon his vagabond son, who was this this design engineer, and we needed to make some some special machines that actually harvest the worms and reprocess them to make the vaccine.

So that was my sort of first introduction as as an engineer into, into the sheep world and what brought me back into the flock, so to speak. And, and that's really, I guess the, the intersection that led to numbness. Yeah.

I think it's really great, Robin, because similar to story to myself, you know, if we spend all of our time looking within the veterinary industry and we gaze at our navel, we actually don't grow as a profession. And certainly when I developed Webinar vets, nobody knew what a webinar was and the reason I developed it was looking into the future, you don't actually have to go into the future, you just have to step into another industry. So I went to an internet conference, heard about webinars and said, why are we not doing this in the veterinary profession and was able to bring it into the profession.

Similarly with your dad, if your dad had tried to do this all on his own and use veterinary expertise, it's the fact that he's gone out and looked for other people, that then that strengthens the team and I think it's, it's becoming more common now, we're probably less conservative than we were 1015 years ago, but I think it is. So important that we don't see ourselves as an island, we actually do look out, you know, to other industries and to other professions and learn, learn from them. That's right.

In interdisciplinary thinking, I suppose you'd call it. That that's, that's what leads to innovation, and the little story around dad's dad's vaccine is that he, he got, he got it working in the lab in the early 2000s and he got, he got a dose that, that, that he thought, OK, this, this would be effective and but it was, it was very, he spent 10 years trying to, to synthesise it using synthesis techniques and he couldn't get anywhere. And thinking that that was the kind of end of the tunnel, he then just did a sort of wildcard experiment where he took 1000 of the dose that was effective and injected it into a sheep, and sure enough he got an immune response and they were, wow, we never would have thought such a small dose would have made a difference.

It was that that simple sort of eureka experiment that then led him to just do some fag packet numbers and think, well, maybe we could actually produce this commercially in the same way that we did in the lab, which was to harvest worms. Essentially they inject the barber's pole into lambs that are about to go to slaughter two weeks before they go to slaughter that then they actually grow worms. The sheep don't become sick within that time.

The the lambs go to slaughter. The Amaze in which the worms live in is then extracted out. It's one of the only parts that isn't used for, for, for as part of the feet of the food chain.

And, and then we built the machine that extracts the parasites from the Abema. So yeah, it was, it was very much a joined up, thinking process between, you know, how do we get these, these little worms that are. A millimetre in diameter and 5 mil long in their thousands in a clean solution out of a rather mucky Abema.

And creating then a solution which obviously massively helps welfare because it's probably not the most pleasant way to die for a for a sheep, is it? For sure, yeah, I mean, it's, it's a horrible, horrible parasite. It's it's a nasty bloodsucker.

They go anaemic and yeah, they don't look great. And so, so yeah, Barbavax, I mean, it's now really taken off and obviously there's been drenches and what have you that have been around for many years, but that's, that's really just a chemical last to last solution. A vaccine is is so is so much better.

It's, it's largely prevalent in, in, in the, in the, in Australia and it's also available in South Africa. I believe you can get it in the UK as well, but only white label through Merlin Vett to imported back into the UK. And I think, I think some sheep farms around Devon and Cornwall that have have wet hot summers, certainly Barbara's poll is, is, is taking hold here as well.

Around, OK, no, it's interesting and of course it's so much better if we can vaccinate rather than put chemicals into the sheep that then, you know, obviously excretes that into the environment and we don't know quite, you know, well we have an idea that that's not great for the. Flora and fauna around that can obviously then be affected and, and so there's a sustainability element, so that's fantastic. But we, we are talking about numb nuts today, it would be great to see the contraption.

This is, the advantage, we're doing this as a video podcast. Those of you listening at some point if you want to, you can come onto the webinar vet site to see the actual contraption itself. So it's .

So you can you explain it. Yeah. I'll do my best to, to try and explain for those of you listening on the wireless, it's, it's, it's something that you've probably not really seen before.

I've, I've sometimes had it described as the, that, if you've watched that film, Men in Black, there's a little ray gun that they, they pick up. So it's, it's really quite different to, to those traditional illustrator pliers that have been around for over 50 years, which really just look like a set of pliers. What numbnuts is, is, is a, is a tool which, accurately and consistently provides local anaesthetic to, a sheep when it is castrated or tail docked.

And, as all vets will know, having anaesthetic put in in exactly the right place close to the nerves is, is vitally important. If, if you're getting dental surgery and you were to put anaesthetic in your left cheek and then drill on the right. I think you'd still have quite a few people jumping out the dentist's chair.

So, so the key to, to, to this was we knew from the research done at Edinburgh Uni that that local anaesthetics were a great way of of combating the ischemic pain for rubber ring, which is by far its highest magnitude within the first hour. The challenge, and this is where the product design challenge came in. Was how do you consistently and safely allow this to be done in a farm environment by maybe non-trained vets.

So, so vets obviously have very good understanding of the anatomy, they know where to put anaesthetics, but it's impractical, even in the UK for vets to turn up at every farm at, at landmarking time and, and provide this. It would just be simply be too expensive. And it's, it was that sort of commercial aspect which led to the, the impetus to to create this device.

So, so what we have is a, is a, is a tool with which we've actually flipped the ergonomics to try and give a better hand grip for expanding the ring. In Australia, they'll often be doing 1000 to 2000 lambs a day with this. So RSI was, was very important.

And rather than having to expand it and twist your wrist whilst you're holding a 15 kg of holding force, after you do 1000, that, that soon starts to give you RSI in your wrist. So this uses the tennis racket grip, which is the strongest sort of grip in the human body. So, so ergonomics for the human was important.

Once it's expanded, we move from a 3 prong tool, a four prong tool to to ours, which is a three-pronged tool. And the three prongs are important because We needed to create that consistency. We needed a datum point which would apply the needle each and every time in the same to.

So behind the centre pin here, the needle is held safely behind that, so preventing needle stick injury. And only at the point where I move my hand away from holding the scrotal sack or the tail, I move my left hand away to push the orange button. Does that allow the needle to advance, inject the dose, retract, suck in the next dose, and off you go.

And I guess what is key to this system is that we use the ring as an integral part of the procedure, if you like. The ring is acting like the jig or the clamp that is holding everything in place consistently so that the anaesthetic is being placed just where we want it between the two spermatic nerves and creating that bolus and preventing the nerve conduction through to the brain. Yeah, that's brilliant.

You've used this obviously a lot in Australia and we'll go over that in a minute, but have you had any problems, because obviously you're using the same needle. How often do you need to replace the needle when you're performing this procedure? Is that sort of post post injection infections commonly asked question by vets, very little asked by farmers.

So the needles we use are are stainless steel sort of they're not just typical, single use needles, they're. They're stainless steel, and they're made to last for, we we we recommend changing them every 2 bottles, so every 150 injections or so. Now it's, it's that delicate balance between infection risk from needles and practicality of actually doing a better job.

One of the, the nice things we discovered about, local anaesthetic, lgnacaine in particular, is that it's actually an antimicrobial. So the the the lignaccaine, bugs don't grow on it. And what you tend to find as the products you use is that you get a little bit of splashback, a little bit of, of, of the anaesthetic actually ends up in that channel, which, where the needle's hidden, and we think that that's actually helping there and acting as, as a, as an antiseptic sort of sponge antiseptic to clean it, clean it and and keep it clean.

Certainly now in Australia we're we're up to 4 million lambs and we we haven't had any feedback to say that we've had problems with with infection. That's brilliant, Robin. I'm very impressive, you know, 4 million, I think.

That they get some respite from what is a painful procedure is fantastic. How long do you think that the anaesthetic, local anaesthetic works before it starts to wear off? We, we know, I guess that's probably best answered in context with the, the magnitude of pain.

So, when you put a rubber ring on, it's, it's not painful instantaneously. You can, well, I often get people to put one on their finger and, and generally it's, it's totally fine for a couple of minutes. It takes about 2 minutes for the, the ischemia, the, the, the blood supply to be cut off.

And then from about 2 minutes to about 35, 40 minutes, it is excruciatingly painful. It's a deep visceral pain, and it's the, the nerve endings that that are supplying that, that appendage, are, are signalling to the brain to say, you know, I, I, I'm lacking oxygen here, I'm dying. And so it's, it's akin to sort of striking your thumb with a hammer or stubbing your toe.

What we see in the lambs is, is a thrashing, a rolling, a very visual, display of, of pain. So this is why we believe that the local anaesthetics are very appropriate here is, is, is obviously, lorcaine as we're using in in Australia, generally takes a minute or so to, to kick in. If anyone's had had dental treatment, it'll almost certainly have been with, with lignnacaine.

The dentist will inject it. You, you'll wait a minute, he'll, he'll test the site, once, once the numb numbness kicks in. And, and generally it, it, it works certainly for an hour, but, but a big part of this is also, is also reducing nerve wind up.

So if you don't have the feeling of that pain during the procedure. You don't have the emotional attachment to it. And, and I guess, you know, where, where we are really with, with sheep castration and tail docking at the moment, certainly in the UK is, is it's back to dental surgery in the 1800s where, where people knew they had to go and get a tooth extracted but were so fearful of the process, the psychological aspect of the process.

It is no anaesthetic. Whereas these days, obviously no one enjoys going to get a filling or a tooth extraction, but in reality, it's, it's the, the, the, the most, the high magnitude and level of pain is completely taken care of with the anaesthetics. Thereafter, if the dentist will say, you know, if you're feeling a bit of ache in your jaw or whatever, take, take an ibuprofen, which in the veterinary world would be probably meloxicam.

And, but in reality, you know, giving someone an ibuprofen and then, then, then doing surgery would not be appropriate. And so although our system and tool puts the anaesthetic in at the same time as the ring is being applied, it actually does, we believe, pretty good pain masking over the most severe, part of the process, which is the first hour. That, that's really interesting and a, a good analogy.

I, I will say that my dentist is female rather than male, and this last week she was giving me a few injections because I'm having my first ever crown put in. So that was quite an interesting experience and actually doing the impressions for the crown, you feel it, you know, in your jaw because of the, the, the sort of force that they're putting on it, so it, it was quite a traumatic experience. Even with the local, but without the local, I, I don't think I would have signed up for it, so it's a really good point.

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So obviously this machine being used for tails and for testicles, so you can use it for, for both and, and you've, you've actually done over 4 million lambs in Australia now. Absolutely, yeah. So, so one of the key design challenges was that obviously rubber rings are used for both procedures.

And a really difficult design challenge was getting the the needle depth, the needle consistency right for, for both. We also knew that the farmers wanted to do this process fast with little faff, so we had to, we had to optimise a dose that would work, for both, so. I think the difference between an engineer and a mathematician is an engineer is happy with the answer that's 80% right.

And that's, that's what we approached this. We said, I think the reason that that this, this, this space hasn't had a huge amount of progress, for, for 30 or 40 years was people were looking for a perfect answer. And, and with, with pain, it's very difficult to provide no pain.

If you can reduce pain by 80%. That's great. Our approach was, if, if we could develop, we're not saying it is completely painless, but we're saying we made a massive improvement, in, in that, and be able to do that to both tail docking and castration in, in a single dose, in a single shot.

With one device, that, that, and the key here was that it didn't add to the time that the procedure took, and, and, and I think I know we have, you have listeners all over the world, but it is worth at this point pointing out the differences between land marking in the southern hemisphere, particularly in New Zealand and Australia versus the UK. So in New Zealand and Australia, nearly all lambs are marked between 4 and 8 weeks of age. They, they are given, they're generally born out in the paddocks in the fields.

They're given 3 or 4 weeks to mother up, to build some mass to get accustomed to the surroundings and sort of grow, should we say. And then the first muster, they're all, they're all brought in at at say 4 weeks of age and they so by that point, obviously they're all born, they're not, they're not born one by one as we would perhaps in barns in the UK. They're all brought in for muster, and they use a lamb marking cradle, which is a sort of whirly gig type device that you can load 4 lambs in at a time.

One person's loading, the next person's adding the tag, the ear tag. They're doing vaccination, and they're doing all the processes all in one go at the same time. So, so in this case, vaccinating tagging.

And providing rings for tail docking castration and, and, and, and, and in a typical commercial farm in the southern hemisphere, you'll be doing anything from 500 to 2000 lambs a day in that process. So, you know, a farmer will bring his neighbours in, you get some labour in for a day or two, and they'll work their way through. Obviously in the northern hemisphere, and this is largely driven by the legislation of the 7 day rule for use of rubber ring, most people castration tail do within, well they legally have to do it in England between 1 day and 7 days of birth.

That rule is, is probably one of the, the biggest challenges that that we face as a company and maybe we can come to that later. But, yeah, just pointing out those differences is, is important with the context of, of, of our, our device. So it's a product that obviously is doing very well in Australia and I can see that if it helps to reduce pain.

You know, 80%, then why would we not do it, but obviously I know what you've said there and from previous chats. There are challenges bringing this into the UK because obviously, of the time also that we use the rings, and I believe also because of the local anaesthetic that you're using. So do you want to explain to us where you're up to within the UK process and and where you see the future, you know, going to, is this a product that we're likely to see in the UK anytime soon?

Well, I very much hope so. It's, it's a sort of a frustrating conversation of largely designed engineers and most of the core science done here in the UK. You know, this is, as I say, the core science done in the 90s at the Royal Dick Vett at Edinburgh Uni showing that anaesthetic is very useful for Robert pain and then also our connection with Morgan Institute who who helped a lot in the early animal trials.

Unfortunately, the impetus came from a farm animal welfare council report in 2008, and they did a big literature review of this whole space and said in that review research should urgently be directed towards providing practical means of local anaesthetic for castration and tail docking of lambs. It was that report which, which got us going. It really set us on this pathway to creating this.

And for me, I guess over the last decade of my life is I I I've based everything I've done on that. Frustratingly though, when we went to search for funding in the UK, it was like looking for water in the desert. There was, there was nobody here that was really prepared to pick up on this recommendation and actually do anything about it.

That's, that's that plus the connection through Barbervax, my dad's product is what led me to Australia. And interestingly, I find a completely different attitude over there that the broad shoulders of the Australian lamb wool industry embraced what we had and funded, you know, a lot of the core developments of numb nuts. To give you some context on that, it's cost about $6 million to get the product from, from, you know, off the drawing board and to the point where it's commercially available.

About 50% of that was was funded by the Australian Farming Network and 50% by myself and my design company. So that's the kind of, kind of money it takes to get something like like this off the ground. We, we first showed Donnuts at a sort of prototype level at the Royal Highland Show, to the UK Chief Veterinary officers, the RSPCA and what have you, who, who gave us lots of pats on the back and said, Well done, carry on.

But unfortunately, none of that led to any significant changes, . And, and, and as a result, in Australia, we the lignnicaine is, is the anaesthetic of choice. Australia, New Zealand, and the US, most other Western countries outside Europe use lignnicaine.

Some maybe older vets will know in the UK, lgnacaine used to be used in the UK up until 2000. But it was then withdrawn off the scheduling by the VMD. I think part as an EU directive.

I describe it being withdrawn a little bit like a classic car trying to meet a modern day safety test. I think we all know it's a very safe drug. It's injected into humans in your drawers every single day.

The problem is, is that it's off patent and the EU laws decided that it needed to prove itself safe. And with it being off patent on a very low cost drug, no pharmaceutical company was willing to put the funds in to do the MRLs, the minimum residue studies, the ESIs, and what have you. So, so the UK veterinary industry lost lignaccaine in about 2000.

And that's ultimately what's caused us a lot of grief because we only have procaine available here, which I believe is a less good anaesthetic. The procaine is actually supplied by two European companies which post-Brexit are not that interested in supplying to the UK. And and I guess our our challenge as a as a device, we're a hybrid company, we're half a pharmaceutical and half a device company.

But in order to provide the solution, we need both supply to come together, both anaesthetic and you know, we've obviously got the tools and we've got the tools ready to sell here in the UK, but without access to the anaesthetic and and in a commercially viable way, we can't do that. The the VND, with the regulations wanted us to, to prove that the procaine had sufficient efficacy, and it took us, we've been trying to apply for funding to get that underway for the last 4 years and . That's, that's been difficult.

We, we got a little bit of funding last year, but not enough to do a dose efficacy response. So, so where we sit currently in the UK is we have outstanding efficacy with tail docking. We know we've got the best UK tail docking device in the world.

Our problem is trying to get the dose amount that works well for castration, is, is proving difficult. And, and it's all, it's all interconnected with the seven day rule. We know that many hill farmers, both in England, Wales and Scotland.

Somewhat ignore this seven day rule. It's, it's, it's a piece of legislation that came in in the 1950s when, you know, back then people were trying to do the right thing. They looked at a lamb that was castrated and tail docked at maybe say 48 hours old.

How much did it wriggle? And then they compared that with one that was possibly done at 4 weeks. How much did it wriggle?

And obviously the one that done at 48 hours wriggled less. What we now understand 40 years later is that the part of the reason it doesn't wriggle as much is because it runs out of energy, you know, they've only been live for 2 days and they they can't physically wriggle that much. So, so the pain experience is, is, is no different depending on the age of the animal.

The unfortunate situation in the UK has found itself in is that. It's legislated for a procedure. It's legislated in a way that stymies innovation, shall we say, the, the Australians, the New Zealanders have allowed us to get together.

Yeah, we're getting it. So really we're at a bit of an impasse in the UK and, having said that, you know, you've shown obviously with your Australian successors what a great product it is, so I hope. There's maybe people listening to the podcast today who er have some influence and can start thinking about how we could use this tool because as you say, at the moment, animals are still being castrated with rings and having their tails docked, and they're not really getting any pain relief for it, so if we have a machine.

That will reduce pain by 50%, 60%, 80%, whatever the number is, that has to be better than just applying the ring with, as you say, a pair of pliers. So, if I could just, I mean, there, there's some interesting policy decisions as well to be made at a at a BVA level. The, the, the, the, the general acceptance I think here is, is, refine, replace, remove, I think is, is so, so in a, in a, in a procedure like this.

That's, that's the high-level doctrine, and, and I completely agree with that, that in a perfect world, we would not castrate and tail dog lambs. It has to be assessed against, you know, dags, the effects of the other way. So it's that's the reason we do it.

We do it for good reasons. Unfortunately, the BBA policy, again, it seems to be one to leapfrog one of those three steps. So at the moment, farmers do it, no pain relief.

As far as I can gather, the current suggestion at the BVA is to go straight from what we have to not, not doing it at all. So just leave the tails on, manage the dags, the fly strike problem in a different way. And with castration, we, we obviously don't castrate because we don't want interbreeding in flocks.

So the suggestion is that the farmers should try and keep males and females separate in fields. Now, now I would say that's a fantastic utopian way of looking at it. What we've tried to create here is a transitional product that can help between where we are today to where we need to get to probably in a decade's time.

And I think, I think that's the interesting debate that needs to be had in the UK is, is, is there a space for this right now, or, or could we at least have some clarity that you want to go directly to removing the procedure altogether? And if that is the case, that's fine. We'll, we'll go and continue to, to, to market numbnuts in other countries which believe that pain relief is and continuing the procedures the way, but.

Yeah, sorry. No, no, it's a good point. Yeah, Robin, thanks so much for that.

You know, obviously good luck with the continuing development of the product. I think it's a really interesting story and I wish you all the best for it and obviously it does seem as if. As you say, similarly to oil, you know, we can't suddenly just get rid of oil from our sustainability story.

So there is transition times and I think this, as you quite rightly said, is perhaps a transitional product. If we are gonna move away from rubber rings, but if we're not gonna move away from them, then I think it's a really great gadget and wish you all the best with it. Thanks Antony, and thanks very much for listening.

Thanks everyone for listening. This has been another episode of that chat. Take care and see you on a podcast soon.

Bye bye.