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ENTREPRENEURS - September 2005 Love and Horses, Naturally
Their company, Lexington-based Equine Nutritional Consultants, and the product they’ve developed to fight ulcers reflect the colorful path they followed to starting their own business. The treatment – ULC-RID – combines herbs, intestinal flora (or “good” bacteria), and minerals to help prevent ulcers and promote healing for existing intestinal irritation and ulcers. And ULC-RID is just one of the many ways the couple has worked with horses throughout their careers. Lynn, who has been riding since the age of five, majored in animal science at Southern Seminary in Virginia and earned her certification as a veterinary technician. She traveled the “A” show circuit and rode horses for the top riders on the United States Equestrian Team until, one day, the galloping horse she was riding reared up and fell on her and ended that career. It was through that fall, however, that her interest in chiropractic therapies and nutrition took off. Meanwhile, Paul was on a hockey scholarship at Boston College. After school, he was drafted by the Philadelphia Flyers. He played for two years until sustaining a career-ending knee injury. Like Lynn, the injury prompted him to become more interested in natural medicine and therapy. He combined that interest with his lifelong love of horses, becoming an assistant trainer for some of the big stables in the area. Horses, in fact, brought Lynn and Paul together. The couple met when Lynn inquired about buying a horse Paul had for sale. Lynn passed on the horse, saying it wasn’t worth what Paul was asking. But after that chance meeting, the two dated and then married. Lynn jokes that she wound up getting the horse for free when she married Paul. After marrying, the couple trained horses together for 12 years, much of the time at the Fairhill Training Center in Maryland. “I galloped the horses, Paul trained them, and we argued in-between,” she said. Along the way, they did therapy on horses, including chiropractic and equine-applied kinesiology. They also conducted seminars on equine nutrition and developed a natural protocol for EPM (equine protozoal myeloencephalitis), a neurological disease that causes atrophy and loss of muscle integrity in the horse’s hind quarters. But today their focus is on ulcers because of the prevalence of the problem. “Ulcers are not a fad disease,” Lynn said. “They are an on-going problem with increasing intensity and occurrence.” The Ayers believe their product offers a simple but real solution to the problem, and they say repeated endoscopic studies have proven them right. They hope to publish a book on the issue soon and to help make that current statistic on equine ulcers a thing of the past. For more information on Equine Nutritional Consultants, see their Web site at www.equinenc.com. |
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Copyright 1996-2005, by Kentucky Business Online. All rights reserved. Editorial content
is copyright 2005, Lane Communications Group The Lane Report is a trademark of Lane Communications Group. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. |
Every racehorse will suffer from ulcers at some point in its life. When Lynn and Paul Ayers read that sobering statistic in The Horse magazine several years ago, it affirmed what they had already learned during 25 years working as equine nutritional consultants.