The power of a horse

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LINDSAY MAST, HOST: Today is Wednesday, June 18th.

Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Lindsay Mast.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

Coming next: healing on horseback.

For children with disabilities, therapy is often a routine part of life, usually in a doctor’s office. But sometimes, it happens in a barn, with a horse.

MAST: It’s called hippotherapy—a unique treatment where licensed therapists guide patients through exercises while on horseback.

WORLD’s Lauren Dunn followed one child’s journey over several months and brings us this story.

LAUREN DUNN: 4-year-old Tucker Backhus wears a helmet and a safety belt as he climbs a set of wooden steps. Flanked by his therapist and two others, he carefully swings his leg over a big brown horse.

TURNEY: What do you tell her?

TUCKER: Walk on.

TURNEY: Walk on.

As Tucker rides around the stable, he plays games. Reaching for a ball suspended from the ceiling as he passes under it. Tossing a ball and catching it. Riding backwards. Sideways. On his hands and knees.

TURNEY: Mr. Tucker, can you turn around backwards for me?

Tucker was born with agenesis of the corpus callosum. It’s a rare condition with a wide range of effects.

His mom, Alisha Backhus, explains that doctors still aren’t sure how many ways it affects Tucker.

BACKHUS: If you think of the corpus callosum being kind of like power lines or a highway or a bridge between the two halves of the brain, he's missing bits and pieces of that. So he has a corpus callosum, but his is very thin, and there's no way for them to tell what pieces are connected and what aren't.

Tucker’s speech is delayed. While he can eat food orally, he has a feeding tube.

Hippotherapy is so important to Tucker’s treatment that his mom drives an hour and 20 minutes to this barn in Goddard, Kan. They came for the first time about two years ago.

TURNEY: The horse's way to connect with us is really powerful. That's where the magic is, I think.

That’s Kori Turney. Turney operates a children’s therapy clinic, but she’s also the executive director at Prairie Meadows Therapeutic Riding Center. Her parents started the nonprofit in the 1980s.

Her dad picked 2 Corinthians 12:9 to summarize the center’s work.

TURNEY: My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness. And the reason he chose that is just his kind of thing was that it's not the disability, but it's the ability that counts and how God can empower us through our weakness to overcome challenges and be strong in our life.

People who benefit from hippotherapy may have any of a wide range of conditions or disabilities. Children and adults with autism, cerebral palsy, brain injuries, multiple sclerosis, Down syndrome and other chromosomal disorders.

The movement of riding a horse mimics walking. It can help kids who aren’t walking yet or who have trouble with balance, like Tucker. It also helps Tucker relax enough to work on other skills, like speech.

TURNEY: He can’t sit on a swing with his feet off the ground, believe it or not, in the clinic and let me push him, but he can be 15 hands off of the ground, sitting sideways, stopping and going, and also completing a fine motor activity or carrying on the conversation, and have no fear.

During Tucker’s session, he rides Diane, a 23-year-old quarter horse.

TUCKER: I ride Diane.

DUNN: What does she feel like?

TUCKER: She feels like, she feels like, cotton candy.

Tucker’s having so much fun as Diane walks in circles around the barn that he hardly notices how hard he’s working.

HOLLY: Can you grab it out of there? Oh, my goodness, wait, hold on. You gotta make a basket.

Tucker’s mom says she sees huge benefits from his time with the horses. After his first few hippotherapy sessions, Tucker saw a neurologist but wasn’t able to answer the doctor’s questions clearly. A few months and several visits to the barn later, he had a follow-up appointment.

BACKHUS: He was able to answer the neurologist’s questions, and he asked me what we had been doing, because he said that was unheard of, that big of a change for him. And I told him, riding. Hippotherapy.

During much of the winter, it’s too cold for hippotherapy. But Tucker keeps working on many of the same skills in the clinic. He finds some tasks there more difficult.

TURNEY: Can you catch?

TUCKER: No, I can’t. Help, help!

TURNEY: Oh, there you did it! Yay, Tucker!

Without the calming effect of the horse, Turney says it’s harder for Tucker to keep his nervous system regulated.

TURNEY: With the messy, with noise, with, you know, being in a room with a lot of visual stimuli, sometimes just airplanes flying over the building will put him into that dysregulation. … We're working on laying those neurological connections and those pathways so that their window of tolerance for stress is better.

Once warmer weather returns, Tucker finally gets to climb back in the saddle—as an April shower pelts the metal roof.

TURNEY: Did you get wet coming in here?

TUCKER: Yeah

TURNEY: Darn rain.

TUCKER: I got wet. I did get all muddy and wet.

TURNEY: Muddy and wet. Oh, my goodness. Well, it’s pretty dry in here.

After a few laps around the barn, Diane stops while Tucker works on balancing and throwing a ball into a hoop fixed to the barn wall.

TURNEY: Ready, set, catch! Get it way high. Woo-hoo, Tucker!

Even in this first session back, Turney sees how far Tucker has come.

TURNEY: Today was great. He did things today, first session, that we didn't get until like halfway through, so like when he was setting side, set on the horse, that was a new thing just at the end.

But before Tucker leaves, there’s one last thing to do.

TURNEY: You gotta tell her how good she did today. What do you tell her?

TUCKER: Thank you.

TURNEY: Thank you, Diane, you are so sweet.

Dunn: Reporting for WORLD, I’m Lauren Dunn in Goddard, Kan.

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