Equine-assisted therapy has grown by more than 20 percent in recent years, allowing psychotherapists all over the world to improve their practices with the use of horses. It’s been proven effective for a wide array of purposes, including the treatment of autism, chronic pain, dementia, Tourette syndrome, anxiety, depression, ADHD, schizophrenia, substance abuse, Down syndrome, domestic violence trauma, management of fear and grief, the development of emotional regulation, and so on. It’s so successful that the U.S. Veterans Administration pays full cost for equine-assisted treatment of combat veterans with PTSD.
About 1,600 equine therapy centers exist in the United States, where therapists use calm horses to show people how to improve their lives. Horses have an uncommon ability to demonstrate fear management and the development of trust, partly because of their size but also because of the neurological idiosyncrasies that accompany a prey animal’s brain.
The average horse is 8 feet long, weighs 1,200 pounds, and stands 5’3″ high at the shoulder with the head and neck rising a foot or so above that. A horse is huge but can accelerate faster than most cars and in any direction. At that size, the equine fear that is part of a prey brain’s constitution is very easy to see. Over time, with training, the horse learns to manage this fear. Watching a horse experience this process and helping it along offers human clients a role model for managing their own anxiety.
In addition, to become comfortable in the human world, prey animals like horses must develop trust in the people around them. As part of their natural herds, they are accustomed to observing their peers and communicating, using extremely sophisticated forms of body language. Horses note body language in humans, too. For that reason, a horse can teach humans how to use body language, how to communicate in new ways, and how to approach someone new—even someone with a completely different way of thinking—and develop a relationship over time.
Horses mirror human emotion as well. At minimum, they can discriminate between human emotions of joy and fear, using the information to decide whether to approach or avoid the person in front of them. In this way, emotions can be transferred back and forth between horse and human in real time. Occasionally I don’t know exactly what I’m feeling, but a horse can often tell me. When I notice while riding that a horse is uncommonly nervous, I ask myself why. Sometimes it’s an equine fear I can assuage, but other times I discover that the nervousness is coming not from the horse, but is mirrored by him from me. Equine hypersensitivity demands human skill in emotion regulation, encouraging clients to learn how to control their moods and soften their actions.
This is only a tiny smattering of the mental health improvements that horses can produce. They also capture clients’ attention, work in natural outdoor environments conducive to human relaxation, demonstrate that violence is not effective, learn in ways that benefit human growth, and allow clients to change at their own pace without implicit pressure.