RUPERT ISAACSON is a champion of equine assisted wellbeing. His well-recognised work is groundbreaking in the development of teaching techniques using horses. Now taught worldwide, his methodologies consolidate the science, proving the connections between nature, play, learning and well- nIess which perhaps have never been so important for us to understand and share.
I run something called the Horse Boy Foundation which works with autism, anxiety, ADD, anything to do with the brain. We are now a worldwide organisation, but it started with a personal story, that of me and my son.
I’m a lifelong horseman, grew up with thoroughbreds. Grew up hunting, chasing, eventing. I moved to America and when my son was born, he was diagnosed very severely autistic. I didn’t know what to do and none of the orthodox therapies I was trying worked, in fact they made it worse.
I thought that my son was not safe around hors- es, so it didn’t occur to me at that point to go down any therapy with riding, but I did seek out mentorship from a very famous autistic person who had started life as severe as my kid; incontinent, self-harming. That’s a woman called Dr Temple Grandin who is very well known in America. She is a professor of animal sciences and if you eat a McDonald’s or Burger King over there, chances are that animal went through a slaughterhouse de- signed by her to be less stressful.
So, I had an interview with her and I said how does my son become you? And she said do three things, she said follow the kid, follow the child in every way, physically, so you can observe. Emotion- ally, so you can see what sensory issues please or displease him. And intellectually, what turns his brain on? What is he obsessed with? And because of this, because I followed her advice when he wanted to go foraging in the woods, I went with him.
Agitated behaviours
Suddenly we had this nice interaction going on, even without words or signs of expression. It was during one of these foraging expeditions he saw my neighbour’s mare and ran to her. He made his own connection with her. He wanted to go back to her every day, and I knew this mare, I knew she was quiet. He was showing me with his body that he wanted to get up on her, jumping up and down next to her with his arms up. So, I would put him up and keep a hand on him while she grazed. All of his really agitated behaviours went away. I didn’t know why at that point; I know why now. I then thought, well what would happen if I rode with him?
So, it’s Texas, it’s a big old western saddle, room for two, all the kids start riding that way. I get up with him, I’m searching for inspiration, I ride down towards the pond, and a big blue heron gets up and flaps away. He says heron! And what’s interesting was that was the same week that his speech therapist gave up on him. And I was like don’t worry, I’ve got a new therapist! She’s got four legs; she’s got these amazing skills!
His speech came really fast. I noticed almost im- mediately the first day that it made a big difference what rhythm the horse was in. If the horse was in any degree collected, you got more speech than if the horse was not collected. I didn’t know why. But it was so clear, so I started to do more and more in collection until I could canter the mare literally on the spot. And I got other kids too, the same reaction, the same reaction. I started painting letters on trees, he starts reading, I started getting friends and family to cluster together, he starts to be counter numeral.
Happiness hormones
Then I thought, I need to know why this is working. I’m a journalist, so always want to know why. So, I contacted neuroscientists in different countries, and they explained to me what was going on. And basically, the rocking of the hips in rhythm when the horse is in collection in that way makes your body produce a hormone called oxytocin. Oxytocin is the main happiness hormone, we’ve got four main happiness hormones, but it’s the big one.
But crucially it’s also the communication hormone, it makes you communicate. And there’s a biological reason why it’s evolved this way, but the fact is that’s what it does. So, you take a child that doesn’t want to communicate and you flood him with a hormone that makes him feel fantastic, and calms down all the sensory issues, and makes him compelled to communicate.
I realised we could replicate this and so Horse Boy Method sort of became a thing. We casually put out one little thing on Facebook in 2010 saying we think we can train other people how to do this, does anyone fancy it? We have just been busy ever since. Now it’s in forty countries, we serve about three hundred thousand families a week, not me personally, but through people we have trained and their progress. It’s in schools, we have a way of doing it without a horse that’s in schools called Movement Method. In Ireland actually quite a lot of schools offer it, particularly in Co Cork and Limerick, David Doyle is the man to talk to.
There’s a connection with thoroughbreds too. We have a programme in San Francisco called Square Peg Foundation run by Joell Dunlap who grew up in the racing industry on the west coast there. She uses exclusively thoroughbreds for this work. And we are basically training the horse in classical dressage so that they can go super collected with the kids on top of them. We find that the thoroughbreds are exceptionally good at this work. Because not only are they super smart, they are super athletic. But they have a super sensitive type of empathy so she works very closely with off the track thoroughbred associations in the USA. We are hoping to build more thoroughbred related programmes for this as we grow.
For more information on Rupert and his pro- grammes, visit Horseboymethod.com or for the unmounted programme go to Athena-equine.com.
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