Greenhill Therapy

They are the champions of Green Hill Therapy in Eastern Jefferson County—where special needs children are experiencing first hand the healing power of the horse.

WHAS11’s Joe Arnold and photojournalist Aron Pryer visited the facility, recently, where the first child they met was two year old Casey Lukee, sitting confidently on a saddlecloth atop Captain, an 18 year old gelding and veteran of the therapy arena.

“What do you tell him?” asks occupational therapist Katie Mattingly.

“Walk on,” Casey says, and Captain obliges. Mattingly walks alongside as Casey’s mother, Tracy Lukee watches from one end of the barn. Casey has been riding Capain for two and a half months.

“We see a totally different child,” Tracy gushes, “Totally different.”

Casey has a sensory processing disorder which leads to coordination problems, behavior issues and sensitivity to some touch.

“At home, we are trying to wrangle him, to wrestle him. He’s bouncing off the walls,” Tracy explains. But as Captain lopes in circles around the barn, Casey is content.

The similarity in the way a horse and a person walks is key to horse therapy’s success. By riding Captain, Casey’s brain gets the natural stimulation of walking. As Captain takes each step, Casey has to make physical adjustments beyond what his coordination would allow on his own two feet. In essence, this is sensory training.

“Every move that Captain makes, Casey’s feeling it,” Tracy explains, “Every move, from his hips to his chest cavity, everything. And it affects his equilibrium too, and helps him become more balanced.”

It’s called “Hippo-therapy,” Hippo from the Greek word for horse. Greenhill Therapy’s work is founded on improvements to “neuromotor function, muscle strength, flexibilty, balance, posture, coordination and speech.”

The founder of Green Hill Therapy is Shirley Cochran, a former exercise rider at Belmont Park and Churchill Downs until 1994.

Cochran was always interested in physical therapy, but while recovering from her own injury, she realized that her riding was helping her recover more quickly. Her own success was the genesis of Green Hill Therapy which she founded in 2000, with just one pony, Daisy.

“I was able to put my two passions together which of course makes it all the better.

Now 35 years old, Daisy still works with the littlest patients, but is joined by a stable of ten other therapy horses.

“We match up every horse with a child depending on how they present themselves clinically,” Cochran said, “Each horse moves differently just like each child.”

The perfect match for six year old Lucy DeSmet is Charlie, a white gelding who was a star show pony.

Lucy is legally blind and copes with other effects of a stroke she suffered after brain tumor surgery four years ago, when she was just two years old. Her disabilities do not prevent her from joining in on the fun at the Friends School in Louisville, where she attends Kindergarten with able-bodied children.

“I like to play in the gym and play outside,” Lucy affirms.

Lucy’s mother attributes her success at school to Lucy’s twice a week hippo-therapy.

“I would have never believed after everything she’s been through that she can do what she does today,” Missy DeSmet told WHAS11’s Joe Arnold, “I’d have never believed it.”

Lucy performs a variety of requested tasks while riding Charlie. Cochran will call out a letter of the alphabet and Lucy has to find it in the sprinkling of letters painted on the pressboard walls of the barn. Sometimes, Lucy has to identify the color of the letter. No easy tasks considering that Lucy can only see out of one eye, and her mother says the vision in that eye is so limited it’s like “looking through a straw.”

Then consider she’s doing all of this while riding a horse, practically bareback, and sometimes facing backwards, a common practice here because it confuses the senses even more and forces the child to really use their senses.

“She’s been through so many different therapies, but this is fun,” Missy DeSmet smiles. “She works so hard, but she doesn’t realize it because she’s having so much fun.”

Lucy smiles, too, her eyes may be weak, but they smile, too. As she sits backwards on Captain, she is instructed to use a plastic bowling pin like a baseball bat to hit a tennis ball suspended from the ceiling by a string.

“This is probably the hardest that she works, but because she’s having fun at it has really helped a lot. It’s been great.”

The half-hour session on horseback is complemented by another half-hour of therapy inside, with more traditional forms of occupational, physical and even speech therapy. This is where Green Hill Therapy is busting at the seams, so Cochran hopes to convert a farmhouse on the 10 acre property into a “new treatment space to include a Sensory Integration Gym, as well as a Snoozlen Room, which is a small contained space that provides a variety of sensory experiences.” Cochran says “research has proven that such a room helps to calm autistic children as well as reach the more involved children on a cognitive level..”

The expansion should also help lower the number of children on Green Hill’s waiting list, children whose lives could forever be changed, thanks in large part to the healing power of the horse.

After every session, the child gives their horse a small treat, presented in a red bucket for the horse to grab. Small payment for a life-altering experience.

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