Welcome to another edition of the Next Level Horse.  Here we bring you the stories of the horses we have in training and their owners.  At Next Level Horsemanship we train all breeds and help horses and people from various disciplines.

Cole the Therapy Horse

This month we highlight Cole.  This beauty came to us from our friends at CATRA (Capital Area Therapeutic Riding Association).  They are a great organization that help people with disabilities improve both physical and mental health through equine therapeutic riding.  CATRA’s horses need to be very good natured and the owners, Ben and Shirley, do a wonderful job of finding the right horses for their program. Sometimes when they bring a new horse into their program it needs a little help from us before it can do a good job as a therapy horse.

Not only do therapeutic horses need to be calm and have a great foundation in basic training, but they also need to be especially tolerant of things we may overlook in other horses.  Cole is a draft cross, a big fella with a kind eye.  He had been ridden before but needed to polish his skills to be better in CATRA’s program.   Initially we worked on refreshing his ground work to improve his body control and suppleness in hand and to make him more responsive on the ground.  At the same time we also focused on desensitizing him to multiple handlers working around him at all angles simultaneously.  In his job, Cole will have to be tolerant of handlers walking at his flank to aid a handicapped rider.

Some of the exercises the riders will do on Cole will be throwing objects such as a ball from their position in the saddle to a handler on the ground.  Cole needed to accept objects moving away and toward him back to the rider, so we worked with him on this and many other scenarios to make sure he could accept a variety of “games” his riders will play as they work to improve their physical skills.

Even though Cole may not work at the canter frequently when used in therapy, the volunteers and staff at CATRA will ride him at that gait to keep him in tune for his job.  We worked a lot on improving that gait to make their jobs easier.  When Cole arrived here he was very fragmented in his upward and downward transitions at each gait and was very disconnected back to front.  He needed to improve his impulsion from behind and become more confident with contact in the bridle so that he could develop more collection in his gaits.  With specific exercises we were able to get Cole much more “rideable” and responsive to contact to where he now can sustain each gait with contact and more fluidly move through his transitions.

Another special thing we taught Cole was to yield his body towards a pedestal and stand quietly while mounted.  In CATRA’s program he will need this feature as handlers from the ground assist handicapped riders into position from a mounting stand and make any necessary adjustments to the riders position before proceeding to the therapy session.

Cole has a wonderful future ahead of him as a therapy horse.  He is big, quiet, kind and patient.  We were excited to have the opportunity to work with him and now as he leaves our program we are thankful that we had a hand in helping handicapped riders improve through helping Cole learn to be his best.