When the pretty girl with four legs and red bows in her hair walked into Tim’s hospital room, his eyes lit up.
Tim, a spinal patient from Bremerton, had been in Virginia Mason Hospital for two days. He couldn’t walk, but when Streaker, a miniature horse about the size of a Great Dane, walked into his room, he swung his legs over the bed and started cooing at her. Guided by handler Brian Hohstadt, Streaker—short for Honeydew’s Winning Streak—walked over to Tim for a scratch between the ears. He happily complied, and after a while, her eyes started to shut and her lips quivered a bit, a sign, Hohstadt said, that she was falling asleep. They stayed like that—a delighted older man in a hospital gown and a tiny spotted horse with bows in her hair—for the duration of her visit. After Streaker left, Tim’s eyes spilled over with tears.
Tears are a common occurrence when Streaker comes to visit, says Amy Morgan, the director of Acute Care Services. Recovery from spinal surgery, in particular, can be excruciating (Morgan says they “fillet” open the back) and many patients can barely move. When Streaker comes to visit, however, they sit up. “They’ll stay engaged for the rest of the day,” Morgan said. She’s seen non-responsive patients reach to touch the horse. When I ask if patients require less pain medication, Morgan said that while they haven’t done any randomized trials, anecdotally, it seems like yes.
Streaker is one of three mini horses that visit patients at Virginia Mason every other Friday with Hohstadt, the president of the Triple B Foundation and a volunteer with Pet Partners, a Bellevue-based organization that pairs hospitals, hospices, prisons, and other facilities with therapy animals like dogs, mini horses, and even llamas. In addition to VM, Streaker and Hohstadt’s two other mini horses make regular visits to Highline Medical Center in Burien, two elder care facilities, and the Monroe Correctional Complex, where they visit inmates in the special offenders program for people with mental illness.
Brian has a friendly and upbeat demeanor, but the work can be stressful, at least for the horses themselves. They’re used to being at home in a pasture in Sultan (and sometimes watching TV on Hohstadt’s couch. Streaker, he says, enjoys football). A 17-story building in the city with slick floors, bright lights, and strangers in scrubs can be overwhelming for a horse. Getting used to it takes training. Hohstadt works to desensitize his horses from strangers and loud sounds by slowly introducing them to novel situations over the course of months. In Streaker’s case, it seems to have worked. A calm, gentle horse by nature, as Tim scratches under Steaker’s jaw and offers her his long, gray beard to nibble on, she nuzzles into his lap. Hohstadt says that she likes him.
Animal-assisted therapy has become increasingly popular in recent years. Some organizations and companies claim to be able to treat, for example, autism through swimming with dolphins. Others claim to treat ADHD, dementia, and PTSD through therapy with dogs. But while the overwhelming majority of studies on animal-assisted therapy have shown that animals do, indeed, make effective therapists, according to the world’s biggest grinch (and my personal father), anthrozoologist Hal Herzog, many of these studies are pretty much crap.
“Most of the clinical trials on the effectiveness of animal-assisted therapy are so methodologically flawed that their conclusions cannot be trusted,” Herzog wrote in Psychology Today. “Therapies involving horses are a good example. In a recent article in the Journal of Clinical Psychology, investigators led by Michael Anestis of the University of Southern Mississippi analyzed all of the published clinical trials on equine-assisted therapy. They found that in 12 of the 14 studies the sample sizes were too small to produce reliable results, and 8 of the studies also lacked no-treatment control groups. In only one of the trials were subjects randomly assigned to treatment conditions, and none of them controlled for the effects of simply being exposed to a new experience or for unconscious bias on the part of the researchers. Based on these problems, Anestis’ team recommended that equine therapy be put on hold until well-designed studies demonstrate its effectiveness.”
Still, even if the studies are flawed, that doesn’t mean animals don’t help patients feel better, at least in the moment. And the effects aren’t just visible on patients alone. When Streaker walked off the elevator at Virginia Mason, a dozen nurses, techs, and other hospital staff stopped what they were doing to come visit. They were utterly delighted to see a miniature horse at work. Morgan says that while normally her nurses try to get Fridays off, now that there are mini horses in the halls, everyone wants to work. Nothing, it seems, boosts morale like a tiny horse.
If you ask Hohstadt, this therapy works. Horses won’t cure cancer or autism or dementia, but after six years volunteering his time—and his horses—with the sick, the elderly, the imprisoned, and those who have no one left, Hohstadt has seen time and again just what these animals do for the people around them. “I’ve had people tell me this is the best therapy they’ve ever had,” Hohstadt says. “For some people, it brings back memories. For others, it just gives them a few minutes to get out of their own heads.”
“Everybody has value and deserves a little joy,” Hohstadt continues. “The horse reminds us of that.”
