This summer, I saw a parent sharing what at first sounded like a wonderful story about how their older child/teenager had experienced a great experience at an equine assisted counseling program. They described their child as nonverbal, and indeed, equine assisted counseling is a remarkable tool for helping with all types of communication, anxiety and neurodivergent realities.
As I kept reading, the flags started turning from green to red. First, they showed a photo of their child with the horse during the session. It is a red flag when an equine assisted counseling clinician allows photos during a counseling session - recording of any type is inappropriate, even still photos, particularly in a situation like this where they described that the child couldn’t and didn’t consent to it.
As I put my glasses on (I can’t see anything but blur without them), I noticed that not only did the horse’s topline, back an hindquarters seem to point to being underweight, the number of ribs that were visible put its body condition between a score of 1 and 2. The horse appeared to be starving. It may not be - maybe it just arrived from a rescue, has dietary needs they are trying to solve, or is recovering from a medical condition.
But none of those things excuse using that horse in a session. Horses who are suffering are an inappropriate choice for a therapy session, every time, both for the sake of the horse and for the sake of the client. If a program wants to take on a horse with a severe condition and rehabilitate the horse, more power to them. But that rehabilitation needs to happen before the horse is utilized in sessions, not simultaneously, at least until the horse meets a baseline standard of health, weight stability and lack of suffering.
Finally, the “equine assisted therapy” program (in air quotes because I can’t find anything online showing a licensed therapist affiliated with the program, which would mean that program title is a misnomer, false advertising and even possibly fraudulent) had a GoFundMe link commented on her post. While not completely unheard of, it’s pretty unusual for reputable equine assisted therapy programs to raise money through GoFundMes. Most are either nonprofits, self-funded or have a nonprofit fiscal sponsor which allow them to raise money when needed in a way that donors can make tax-deductible gifts and count on fiscal integrity.