While separate and distinct theoretical approaches have been well recognized in traditional therapy settings for many years, equine therapy has been categorized as experiential from the beginning. Especially for those who are not familiar to the unique modality of healing horses can offer, it has been all too easy to simply place this form of therapy into the same category as rope courses, art therapy, and wilderness courses. Yet, in classifying equine therapy in this way, not only has the feeling and understanding of the work been stilted, but also the fact that in incorporating horses into the therapeutic dimension, separate theories have evolved, just as with traditional therapy, has been missed.

When equine therapy first became popular as a therapeutic modality, it found it’s way into many addiction treatment centers. At the same point in time, the theory of dual diagnosis — where addicts are understood to have a secondary diagnosis in addition to an addiction — was also gaining ground.

As more and more sufferers of addiction were found to have experienced trauma that might be at the root of their proclivity for addictive substances, the thought was that introducing horses that have also been abused in some way, would help these patients relate to the horses, and consequentially, their own traumas.

Don’t we, as equine practitioners have a duty to understand these incredible creatures as unlike ourselves? We, we must remember, come to them for healing. Not the other way around.

Horses have always had to escape predators. As prey animals, their survival has forever depended on their ability to run. While horses are fast creatures by nature, they are not the fastest. However, they can typically run for longer periods of time than most of their predators.

In order to remain alive, then, they had to become better at detecting potential predators than the predators were at remaining undetected. They had to sense that they were being stalked before a predator was able to get too close, and therefore able to overcome them before they could outrun him. So the horses’ task of surviving then, becomes directly related to their ability to perceive any potential threat that enters their environment, and to react quickly to this threat.

For this reason, horses are constantly watching everything in the environment. People often describe this as “flighty” or “nervous,” as the horse can react very quickly, often without warning. Yet this is the horse’s only way of ensuring his safety. What this means as a healer is that the horse has an innate ability to detect subtle psychological shifts within a person that render him unsafe.

How is it that a horse is so finely tuned to “read,” people, and thereby offer healing, even when the answers are not obvious? Well, when a horse scans the environment, a heightening of the sensations that provide feedback for the events in the environment occurs.