Equine Therapy
Food Chain Radio Show #1,006
Michael Olson, Author & Urban Farming Agriculturalist
Equine Therapy
Can one be healed by horses?
Guests: Jean Kvamme & Stacy James-Ryan – Lichen Oaks Adaptive Riding Center
To heal a broken body, frazzled nerves or confused mind, we take drugs, and we take lots of them. But what if… what if we could be healed by horse?
I was once healed by horse. Way back then I was an inner-city, rabble-rousing community-organizer, when things got out of hand and just quit making sense. There were a lot of confusion cures available on the streets in those days, as there are today, but none of them appealed, and so I went home to Montana and took a job as a hired-hand on a ranch.
The days were filled with hard physical and mental labor. I ate hungrily of the ranch meals and slept the deep sleep of work done well. The big reward, however, came at the end of the work day. After the evening meal, I would saddle up a quarter-horse gelding for a ride out into the lingering twilight of those great big prairie skies.
Though the horse and I never talked much, something must have been communicated, because things began making sense again. After the season was over, I returned to my big city, healed by horse.
Equine therapy is now claimed to be an effective therapy for physical, cognitive, emotional and spiritual afflictions, including attention-deficit, autism, conduct and dissociative disorders, dementia, post traumatic stress and many other related disorders. And so we ask…
horses as well as other animals seem to connect humans back with the land and themselves.
when i was a young girl i was raised on a horse farm and had troubled teen years and every day after school i would ride my horse.
i currently run a farm and we raise beef, turkeys and have our horses on our farm.