Neglected horses help heal at-risk teens at rescue farm
Published: August 9, 2007
At first, ranch owner Deb Hoyt kept the horses that were skittish and ill-tempered away from the teenagers who came to her farm for healing.
Her rescue program for abused and neglected horses was separate from her therapy program for at-risk youth.
But the teens tended to be drawn to the most troubled horses.
“This is something I never expected,” Hoyt said. “We just - wow - the kids just kind of seem to know the horses who are like them.”
Hoyt runs Healing Hearts with Horses for free, working as a waitress all winter to pay for the hefty expense of horse care.
She doesn’t know the histories of the youths - just that they’re from group homes run by Children & Families of Iowa in Des Moines and Youth Homes of Mid-America in Johnston.
She doesn’t know which youths have no family to turn to, which ones have behavior problems, which are recovering from a crack cocaine habit, which were sexually abused, which have shown a weakness for weapons and law-breaking.
But she comes to understand a little about each teen during weekly visits to her outdoor horse arena.
One girl started crying when she was introduced to a mare that had recently had a miscarriage, although Hoyt had told no one that. Hoyt was mystified by the girl’s tears.
“She said, ‘I just feel like this horse is really sad,’ ” Hoyt said.
The girl later revealed one of her deepest secrets: She’d had an abortion.
“No one knew,” Hoyt said. “But she felt a kinship with this horse right away. I was just blown away by it.”
PROGRAM TAMES WILD SPIRITS
Hoyt’s equine-assisted psychotherapy program is less about learning how to ride and more about boosting confidence through learning to halter, groom and gently control a horse.
“Our rule is: If you can’t clean a hoof, you can’t ride,” she said.
In one lesson, she teaches how to “join up” with a horse. It starts with sending the horse away and ends with establishing, in a respectful way, that the human is the boss. Once the horse shows acceptance, it will follow wherever the teen walks, without a lead rope.
“Some are just tearful. ‘The horse likes me.’ They’re usually the kid nobody likes,” Hoyt said. “I tell them, ‘It doesn’t matter if you’re fat or skinny, what color you are, the horses know if you’re a kind person. They can feel that.’ ”
Hoyt, 49, used to be a foster parent. In 16 years, she took in all kinds, from fire starters to animal killers. She tallied one dead goat, two dead rabbits, one dead cat and one hamster with its tail cut off, thanks to two boys and one girl.
“They looked and acted like normal kids, but they had anger issues,” she said. “They didn’t know where to go with their anger, so they took it out on animals.”
Grooming horses can calm a child’s spirits, she said.
“And they needed a lot of calming,” she said.
She paused, took a bite of an unpeeled carrot from the eight pounds of carrots she had purchased that morning, and added: “We found it’s pretty hard to kill a horse.”
Hoyt always wanted to develop a horse therapy program for youths outside her own family, but as a mother of eight who was running a child care plus a dog-and-cat rescue effort, she told herself she didn’t have the time or money.
Then the cancer was discovered in winter 2003.
During the chemotherapy and radiation to wipe out the rectal tumor, Hoyt had a God moment.
“If I live … ” she vowed.
YOUTHS LEARN HOW TO TRUST
During the program’s pilot project in spring 2004, a pony named Snazzy had fallen into a depression after Hoyt got rid of her sister, Jazzy, and preferred to be left alone. The two sister ponies had been together since birth, but Jazzy had drifted into a habit of eating to the point of sickness. Jazzy needed to be corralled in a dry lot, so Hoyt gave her to someone who had such a pen.
A boy named Shawn was instantly attracted to the moody Snazzy.
“I told him, ‘That pony is naughty, so we don’t use her, but you can pet her,’ ” said Hoyt, whose cancer has not recurred. “He said, ‘Well, I’m naughty sometimes, too.’ ”
Hoyt agreed to let him work with her - and Snazzy surprised Hoyt with her sweet-tempered behavior.
At first, Shawn clung to the pony, hunched over the saddle horn.
“I told him, ‘When you’re ready to trust, let me know,’ ” Hoyt said.
It came out in therapy while Shawn worked with Snazzy that he knew what it was like to be split from a sister. He said his foster parents had adopted his sisters, but didn’t want him. His new foster parents were interested in making him part of their family, but felt some reluctance because of his behavior problems.
“One day he said, ‘Deb, I’m ready to trust,’ and he just closed his eyes and put out his arms and said, ‘Let’s go.’ I said, ‘Who are you ready to trust?’ He said, ‘You.’ I said, ‘Who else?’ He said, ‘Snazzy.’ ‘Anyone else?’ ‘My family,’ he said.”
Shawn was adopted by the family. Hoyt hasn’t heard from him in a while but hopes he’s doing well.
Snazzy became one the best therapy animals Hoyt owned. A year or so later, the pony, who had always been a clever escape artist, slipped out of her pen. She ran down the highway, was hit by a passing vehicle and died.
Another gentle pony, Willie, is doing his best to take her place.
Earlier this month, a girl who was terrified of animals had her first session at the farm.
Offered a chance to pet a powder-puff gray kitten, the girl shook her head and backed away. “Does he have claws?” she asked, and wrapped her arms around herself.
Hoyt paired the girl with Willie.
The first task: Put the halter on. Hoyt doesn’t tell the teens how to halter a horse. She wants the kids to build confidence to tackle the unfamiliar, without instruction. She wants them to experience successes in tasks that are intimidatingly outside their comfort zone.
The girl watched another teen do it, followed the advice to “fake confidence,” then haltered Willie in less than one minute. She was soon ready for a full-grown horse - and took a shining to MayDay.
“Of all the horses,” Hoyt said later. “I never would’ve picked that horse for her.”
HORSE’S ATTITUDE MATCHES TEEN’S
MayDay has the massive build of a draft horse. She’s two hands higher than the rest of the mares in the herd. She was born on the Hoyt farm two years ago on May 1.
“She was a mistake,” Hoyt told the girls. “She wasn’t bred intentionally.”
Her mother, Midnight, arrived at the farm pregnant and with a scar encircling her belly from some unknown horrific injury. She has a temper and has learned to fight back when people make her angry.
“She does not like men,” Hoyt said. “You can’t get a whip anywhere near her or she’ll go berserk.”
After three years of Hoyt’s care, Midnight is mostly cooperative, but won’t let anyone ride her.
“Underneath all that baggage is a neat horse,” Hoyt said.
MayDay, meanwhile, has some of her mother’s strength of character. When Hoyt was relocating a herd from one pasture to another, MayDay flipped out. Like children in foster care or anyone else, they can become agitated when moved around against their will. The 1,200-pound horse bulldozed Hoyt from behind and stepped on her hand.
“Even the best horses are unpredictable,” Hoyt said, cradling the brace on her bruised hand.
The girl who is scared of animals did fine with MayDay, cruising all the way to the “carrot time” that Hoyt ends each session with.
When the boys arrived a few days later, the horses were segregated. The dark-colored horses were harassing the light-colored horses so much that Hoyt put them in separate pens.
MayDay, however, was bent on picking on any horse that came near her. When she nipped at Felicity, it caused an outcry and the stomping of feet - from the horses and two nervous boys.
Brandon, the boy who selected MayDay, and Tony, who selected Felicity, reported the bite to Hoyt.
“And what did Felicity do?” Hoyt asked them.
“Walked away,” Tony answered.
Hoyt nodded and patted Felicity’s neck. “Good choice,” she told the horse.
MayDay continued acting like a hyper child. When Brandon tried to halter her, she danced away, or chomped her teeth on the halter lines for some tug-of-war, or sniffed Brandon’s shirt, or snorted hot breath into his face. She chased a bushy-tailed cat named Snickers, led Brandon to the drinking bucket so she could splash at the water, and, twice, reared up on her hind legs.
“She’s being obstinate,” Brandon told Hoyt, who encouraged him but didn’t assist him.
“Are you obstinate?” she asked Brandon gently. “Sometimes horses mirror how you are.”
Each time Brandon said he was going to call it quits, he instead invented a new strategy.
“Good horsey,” he crooned, carefully blowing away the flies plaguing MayDay’s eyes. “Goooood horsey. Yeah, I got a mind of my own, too.”
He kept in mind Hoyt’s lesson that if you approach a horse head-on, that’s a sign of aggression. “Want to be my friend?” she had said. “Be at my side, don’t be in my face.”
Standing to MayDay’s left, Brandon held the horse’s neck firmly, slipped the halter over her nose and around her ears, and fastened the buckle. Done.
FINAL LESSONS: LIFE AND DEATH
All of Hoyt’s horse lessons have a tie to life.
In one exercise, the kids each had to persuade their horse to jump over a low, horizontal pole without touching, bribing or talking to the horses - or each other. One group of girls grew frustrated as all the horses ignored them right up until the end of the session. Staff at the group home said the girls were abuzz all week plotting strategies.
The next session, the girls silently worked as a team. They moved the jump so it was between a brush pile and a fence railing, giving the horses nowhere else to go but over. They tied ropes together and used the line to chase the horses toward the jump. They knew that once they got one horse going, all would follow.
One summer, Hoyt told a some kids, including a girl who had attempted suicide, that they should say goodbye to Rio. An ex-roping horse with no teeth, lame legs and a damaged neck muscle, Rio had lost his will to live.
Hoyt told the girls the veterinarian would put him down.
Some girls wept. They all snuggled Rio’s thin frame and petted him repeatedly.
The next day, Rio wandered to the barn for some food. The vet came with the euthanasia supplies and was startled to see that his downtrodden demeanor had evaporated.
The next week the girls cried out to see Rio alive. They held a bake sale to buy special feed and lavished attention on him, and his appetite resurged.
The next spring, Rio settled down in a pasture and passed away peacefully.
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