It’s impossible not to anthropomorphize when it comes to horses. We can’t help but assign the emotions of joy and contentment when we watch some of our therapy horses in their sessions. Where they sometimes fidget and mouth their handlers when they attempt to touch their faces, they move not a hair as patients unsteadily reach out small hands to pet muzzles or cheeks.
- Stormy’s always happy to socialize with visitors
Stormy is as precocious a young horse as you’ll find, wise beyond his years and seemingly born to do therapy work. With most Hippo and TR horses well into their teens, at only 6 years old Stormy is far from ordinary. He belongs to our Barn Manager, Bonnie, who has generously been leasing him to NCEFT for the past year.
In 2005 Bonnie was living in Visalia, CA, running Sunny Days, a private carriage service. While searching for a pair of white horses to use for formal events, Bonnie fell in love with Fjords and began looking for a matched set of grey duns. After seeing a photo of Stormy online, at the time only a month old, she fell in love. A couple months later Stormy stepped off the trailer from Michigan, a gift from Bonnie’s father. Over the next year Stormy was more dog than horse, going for long walks with Bonnie and her kids around their neighborhood and in downtown Exeter. By age two he was being ground driven, by three he was between the shafts of a light cart, and by four he was attending schooling shows.
- Stormy and one of his Hippotherapy patients
A year later, Bonnie loaded up her three horses (by then adding a second Fjord to her small herd) and moved up to Los Gatos. Believing their strong driving background made them ideally suited to therapy work, she began looking for a facility interested in using the horses. Three months went by before Bonnie found NCEFT, and it wasn’t long before they were participating in sessions.
Stormy is now following in his Uncle Sebastian’s footsteps, well on his way to becoming an invaluable member of the NCEFT team. A regular participant in hippotherapy, vaulting, therapeutic driving, and soon therapeutic riding, Stormy is the definition of versatile. Though care is being taken to make sure our star player doesn’t get burned out, his positive attitude and laissez faire outlook lead us to believe he’ll be a happy member of the program for many years to come.
