Dr. Lynn Hillyer:

We increased our use of hair in recent years. As soon as we became confident that hair was accredited, passed all the tests and jumped through all the hoops it needed to be a reliable matrix, we rapidly increased our use of hair since 2020. To answer the question of whether hair is the best or not, it is not. The Senator is correct. Hair is very good at detecting substances for a long period of time. I was smiling when the Senator spoke about human testing because he is dead right. It is very useful in humans. It is even better in horses because they have more of it. A typical section of mane is about six inches, which gives evidence of exposure for about six months. If you go to the tail, you can get more. It is a fantastic thing for us to work with. We cannot switch to it completely, however, because there are drugs that can only be detected in urine or blood. We must make sure we have coverage of all three, carefully, with a lot of assessment and strategy to make sure we take hair samples when we know we want coverage of the previous six months. A competition is exactly when you would take hair samples. Pre-race, blood samples are perfect for looking for so-called biological things such as peptides and proteins - drugs that do not hang around for very long. They literally are in and out in a matter of hours. Hair would be no good for that because it would not pick them up. You need to use different matrices together. I pushed hard to increase our hair use because I recognise it can be efficient. It is a very sensible way of using resources for all the reasons the Senator said. We cannot do it at the expense of the other type of testing. We have to do a balance of the three types.