Wyoming News Exchange

Equine therapy group makes a difference for young people
 
By Patrick Filbin
Gillette News Record
Via Wyoming News Exchange
 
 
GILLETTE — The barn was quiet, save for the subtle shuffling of a 2-year-old’s shoes on the soft dirt.
Sunshine flooded through a door on the west side of the building. Sara, a quarter horse that made a career as a pick-up horse for rodeos, waited patiently in the middle of the barn with a two-step pedestal on her left side.
Kelly Stone stood near Sara’s head. Sam Costello was on the right side and Jamie Hendryx held 2-year-old Dan Bourne’s hand across the dirt.
Dan and his twin brother Tom were born 13 weeks early. They weighed 2 and 2.5 pounds and have both battled development issues all their young lives. Hendryx, an occupational therapist, has been working with Dan since he was 10 months old.
Laura Bourne, the twins’ mom, said Hendryx recommended hippotherapy, a unique approach to physical and emotional therapy that uses horses as a therapeutic way for rehabilitative treatment.
When he started, Dan would constantly cry, kick, scream and was only able to lie down on the horse’s back because of some physical limitations.
On Tuesday, Dan made his way up the two-step pedestal, was lifted up onto Sara’s back and sat up tall and proud like a seasoned cowboy.
“What we say?” Hendryx asked.
“Walk on,” Dan said, and Sara calmly started walking on the soft dirt.
Hendryx isn’t a typical equine specialist.
“I was scared of horses three years ago,” she said. “Kelly has got me on a horse a couple of times now, but I’m still a novice rider.”
Hendryx has known Stone for years. Stone is the creator and director of the Sunrise Wellness and Recovery Center in Gillette.
The center, through meditation, sobriety and abstinence from substance abuse, leads people along the path of the wellbriety movement and started in 2016. Around that same time, Stone and Hendryx met with a client of Hendryx’s about the potential for offering hippotherapy.
Hendryx by no means is a horse person, but she knew that Stone and another friend was. Thus, Ride and Shine Equine Assisted Therapy was born.
“We rode with our one patient the first summer just to make sure we knew what we wanted to do,” Stone said.
Hendryx said she had lots of trust in Stone when it came to joining the program.
“I like to help people,” Hendryx said. “If you could talk to any one of our families, they will tell you that this has been the most beneficial thing for their children. It’s amazing to watch the kids.”
Stone grew up around horses and like a lot of people from this part of the country, looked at horses as athletes who are at their best when performing at a high level, whether it be for competition, ranching or other uses.
Starting Ride and Shine has completely changed the way Stone understands horses and how he works with them. All his life, Stone has looked at horses from a trainer’s perspective.
“I had no idea what equine therapy even was,” Stone said. “Once we started it and seeing the difference it made in that first person within two weeks, it was bigger and stronger than I ever thought it would be.”
Stone and the rest of the organization’s volunteers saw the healing powers a horse can have.
“A horse understands what’s going on,” Stone said. “They read the aura of a person. They know who you are. You can be 100 yards away from one and they’ll know if you’re a jerk or not.”
Ride and Shine had one rider in its first year in 2016. The next year the program added another rider and in 2018 the program got four new riders.
In 2019, they have added a handful of new riders as well as a mental health component to the program — lead by Heather Schmelzle — and have added a small adaptive riding aspect as well.
Once Dan was on the horse, the three-person team walked gingerly but intentionally around the barn. They made stops along the way to find puzzle pieces hidden along the railings.
Dan would point from atop the horse to puzzle pieces of zebras, giraffes and other animals and place them on a board that Hendryx held.
For another exercise to strengthen Dan’s core, Costello would hand the little man bean bags that would stick to Sara’s saddle with the help of Velcro. Dan would carefully place the bean bags in front of him, to the side and even behind him so he would have to twist his body nearly at a 90-degree angle.
“It’s a very effective and efficient treatment,” Hendryx said. “Every one of our kiddos was struggling with walking, standing or something along those lines. The horse makes it easy to work on all of those goals.”
Laura said that she has been amazed at the progress both of her boys have made. Tom dealt with more physical issues and Dan with more emotional issues.
“I didn’t expect the results that he’s had to the extent he has,” Laura said. “Tom has gone from not being able to walk to running, sitting up on the horse and he has improved in all other areas across the board.”
Laura said that even small parts of the boys’ attitude to their sessions is indicative of how the therapy works.
“Going from boys being scared and crying at the beginning of every session to walking up to this massive animal 20 times their size shows that there is a bond between the horse and the kiddos,” she said. “It’s amazing.”
Hendryx admitted that trying to coax a toddler do what you want is not the easiest thing in the world. It makes it even harder as an occupational therapist to do that in a static office setting.
“We put them on the back of a horse and they become calm,” Hendryx said. “They’re looking around and they don’t even know that every time we take a step, they’re working on their core strength, their hip motion and all of those things.”
Hendryx has done the math, and in each session they take about 2,500 steps around the barn.
“That’s 2,500 opportunities for them to learn a different way to move that you and I take for granted,” she said.
It’s not just a physical thing either.
“You could see their attitude change when they walk in the door,” Schmelzle said. “A lot of my clients will say this is their calm place, so it’s about taking this calm out into the world.”
Near the end of Dan’s ride, the group huddled around Sara took a break on the north side of the barn.
Jordan Parker, a volunteer for Ride and Shine who has worked with Stone for four years, grabbed a bucket for the bean bags. Stone called Parker another one of the program’s great successes.
“When he came to me you couldn’t get two words out of him,” Stone said. “Now he’s one the best horsemen and cowboys I’ve been around. He has a way with these horses.”
Hendryx thinks back to a 5-year-old she worked with in the program. When the group started with her, she only had a few words she would say.
“They didn’t make much sense,” Hendryx said. “In a year’s time, she called Kelly by name, she would (tell the horse) ‘Let’s go now,’ and she has developed real sentence structure.”
The staff even realized that every time they made the trip around the barn, the young girl would read a John Deere sign and say out loud, “Runs like a Deere.”
“No one has taught her that,” Hendryx said. “In just a matter of a year, she has become such an amazing child that has learned to communicate with her world.”
Hendryx said the girl’s temper tantrums have subsided and “that has something to do with what we do here.”
“That is the magic of whatever we’re doing,” she said.
Back in the barn, Parker put the bucket down in the dirt and Dan took his time peeling off bag bags and throwing each one in the bucket.
Laura strongly believes that if it weren’t for equine therapy, her boys would be scoring in the “highly dysfunctional” ranges of aptitude and behavior tests.
Today, both are testing in the normal ranges.
On one of the last trips around the barn, with his brother Tom waiting patiently near a row of horses for his turn, Dan did something for the first time.
“Woah,” Dan said quietly, giving a cue to Sara to stop.
 
On a dime, Sara stopped.