HORSE LOVE A
HORSES can be cranky. They can buck and put you into orbit.
They can lay their ears back and bite, strike and kick.
But, they can be gentle and perceptive when it comes to their interactions with humans, especially those who are just that little bit different. They can sense a physically broken body just as easily as they can sense a broken mind. Jenny Haines, who has operated the Ranchlands Equestrian Centre at Kelso for the last 43 years, thought she had seen it all, that is, until she started practising equine assisted learning.
This involves the coming together of humans suffering some form of mental or physical disability with mankind’s most devoted beast of burden, the horse. For Haines, a riding instructor and champion equestrian, using horses to help people mend their lives, is her new mission in life. The stories she tells are astounding. They leave you wondering if animals, particularly horses, can look into our souls and see who we really are.
We are all familiar with the horse whisperer, the person who can ‘speak’ to horses. After talking to Jenny, you come away with the feeling that it is a two-way street and that horses ‘whisper’ back. Listen hard and you might hear them. She has children out there at Ranchlands who are troubled at school, who are bullied and anxious about their lives and maybe just a little bit behind the eight ball when it comes to working out what this thing called ‘life’ really means. Through this peculiar interaction between animals and humans, the horses help them gain a perspective on the things that go on around them.
Jenny had a group of defence force personnel at Ranchlands for five days.
All of them were suffering from some sort of mental trauma. Several of them had not long returned from operational duty overseas.
Some had ‘trust’ issues.
Basically, their ability to place trust in others had been destroyed while on deployment. This was placing a negative weight on their relationships back home.
They were assigned horses, not to ride but to ‘hang out’ with while they were at Ranchlands. The idea was to build a relationship, to establish trust. On day two the soldiers were lined up holding the horses, when all of a sudden two of the horses – Regie and Rosie – just dropped to the ground. They lay there flat-out out, completely vulnerable, having a nice old snooze. Jenny thought they had both succumbed to gastrointestinal colic at the same time. She’d never seen anything like it happen before. This was until she realised they were sound asleep.
They had gone from standing there to sleep in the blink of an eye. Both horses were snoring. It was like they had both said to each other, ‘let’s do this’ and they did. After a couple of minutes, they scrambled to their feet, shook themselves awake and stood there in front of the two soldiers as if nothing supernaturally weird had just happened.
“A horse is most vulnerable on the ground. They were telling the soldiers something. I think it had to do with trust,” Jenny said.
“This is the question we asked the soldiers afterwards: ‘What do you think it means, the fact the horses went to sleep?’ The soldiers replied, ‘they must trust us’.”
At the end of the five days Jenny said her goodbyes to the ADF personnel. “I asked one of them, he was a big feller, how he was feeling now that it was over. He turned away and wiped his eyes and when he turned around, he said to me ‘I