Horse Tales

Equine Assistance for Body and Mind

by Sukey Pett, March 30, 2007

Skarloey waited for T.J. to finish buckling the girth of the saddle, his fingers tripping on the intricate buckle. Skarloey is a chestnut gelding with a white blaze down his muzzle; T.J. is an autistic 14-year-old boy.

Even inside the barn at Southlands Foundation, just outside Rhinebeck, it was cold enough that humans and horses alike could see their breath. Nancy King, an occupational therapist and director of A Horse Connection, gave T.J. short verbal cues—“gentle touch” and “quiet hands”—as they readied Skarloey. During the preparations, T.J.’s attention scattered easily. He repeated the word “chocolate,” which, in the veiled world of autism, could mean he wanted chocolate, or that he was just hooked on repeating the word—a behavior known as perseveration. Another time, T.J. took out his grooming tools to brush Skarloey’s mane, but got distracted.

Skarloey, through it all, remained stoic, showing no signs of the layperson’s perception of equine impatience: tail flicking, snorting, pawing. When Skarloey and T.J. both were ready, Nancy led them to an indoor ring for a hippotherapy session.

Hippotherapy literally means “treatment with the help of the horse” (hippo- taken from the Greek word for horse). The idea of seeking aid for human ailments from horses began (in modern times) in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria in the 1960s—at that time as an adjunct to physical therapy. By the 1970s, interest had spread to the US and other countries, and over the next two decades standardized curricula were developed in the US for teaching therapists this specialty. The American Hippotherapy Association (AHA) was established in 1992; by 1999, the American Hippotherapy Certification Board was in place.

Today, a hippotherapy clinical specialist (a term preferred by the AHA over “hippotherapist,” ingrained though it is, given the current medical/insurance reimbursement milieu) must be a licensed physical therapist, occupational therapist, or speech-language pathologist who has additionally trained and earned certification in the use of horses as a tool to achieve treatment goals. Clients often come through physician referrals.

Specific riding skills are not taught in hippotherapy; that is the domain of therapeutic riding, which teaches riding skills to people with special physical, cognitive, emotional, or social needs. That approach does not require a therapist’s degree but practitioners need special training as a therapeutic riding instructor. Other therapeutic forms that use horses may focus on grooming, leading, feeding, and other tasks, or on the nature of the human-horse interaction (as is equine-facilitated psychotherapy).