Why Close Encounters With Animals Soothe Us

This article is part of New York Times’ “The Health Issue: What Animals Are Teaching Us about Human Health”, and it focuses on horses. If you want to find out the connection between house cats and children with motor skills and cognition issues, what dogs with a gene mutation can teach people about obesity, or a number of other fascinating things from tortoises, kites, chimps, roosters or mongooses, just click on the respective icon appearing as you scroll down. It’s a wonderful read for the weekend.

But back to horses now. Charles Siebert, who also wrote an impressive piece on what parrots know about PTSD, introduces us to an equine-therapy program in Los Angeles, where children aged 8 to 18 go to ”find a refuge from drugs and street-gang culture by developing equestrian skills and learning to regard the knowing gazes of 1,000-plus-pound horses and guide their beguiling power”. Specialists quoted in the article say that animal therapy is similar to something neuroscientists have recently observed through neuroimaging on the brains of people who took psychedelic drugs.

Therapists explain the animal therapy like this: 

"The degree of neurogenesis stimulated by animal therapy, and how lasting the effects might be, is difficult to measure. But therapists involved in such programs speculate that their benefits actually derive from shutting down for a time some of our brain’s higher and sometimes cacophonous cognitive functions."

An 8-year-old who rides horses at the LA center explains it like this: 

“The first time I rode a horse when I was 3. We had a pony at our ranch. His name was Bugsy. I got on Bugsy, he was going too fast, I fell off and got right back on. I would say, if you’ve never seen a horse or touched a horse, just touch it. Because if you touch it, then you’ll feel the soul.”