Prince Phillip dropped his enormous head into Katie Keeler’s lap. Katie touched his muzzle and smiled. Prince Phillip cocked his head and looked at her.
Katie, 14, is a quadriplegic and gets around, usually, in a wheelchair. Prince Phillip, 12, is an Arabian horse, and one of Katie’s closest companions.
The two meet every week at the Saddle Up! Foundation in Parker, a center devoted to using horses to help people with emotional, mental and physical challenges. In Katie’s case, that means sitting on Prince Phillip’s back and, with the help of a therapist and volunteers, riding the brown Arabian around a ring.
“The connection is better than between a person and a person,” said Keeler, a broad-grinning redhead who just started ninth grade at Cherry Creek High School. “The horses don’t judge you. They just listen.”
The Saddle Up! Foundation helps not only the people dealing with physical challenges but also those whose lives revolve around caretaking for loved ones.
“The parents don’t sleep, and the siblings are taken from therapy session to therapy session to therapy session,” said Shery McDonald-Galbreath, Saddle Up!’s founder and president .
To make the families’ lives easier, McDonald-Galbreath built a 20,000-squarefoot barn with an indoor ring, complete with an elaborate viewing area that feels more like an upscale rural house than part of a barn. The viewing area has plush couches and love seats. It has shelves heavy with books about horses. A big kitchen. A canopied bed fills a nook in the space. Broad windows overlook the ring, and behind the kitchen, French doors open to the outside.
Even more, the facility has a separate suite where parents can spend the night.
“Parents never go on dates,” said McDonald-Galbreath, as she led a tour of the facility in leather riding boots. “We will give them a nice, comfortable dinner, with candles. I’ll give them an a la carte menu: See a movie, have a massage.”
She watches the children, and the next morning everyone has breakfast.
If it weren’t for Keeler, McDonald- Galbreath would probably still live in Cherry Hills, and the foundation would not exist.
McDonald-Galbreath’s and Keeler’s families were friends before the creation of the foundation. About eight years ago, Keeler, who became a quadriplegic during a car accident when she was 7 months old, looked up at McDonald-Galbreath and asked, “Can I ride?”
At the time, McDonald-Galbreath had a barn and kept several horses at her Cherry Hills house.
She couldn’t put Keeler on a horse, at least at that moment. But McDonald-Galbreath began investigating the question and learned about therapeutic horseback riding and “hippotherapy,” which therapists use as a tool to help people with disabilities.
All of this inspired McDonald-Galbreath. She started the foundation at her Cherry Hills home but quickly understood it needed more space. So two years ago, McDonald-Galbreath, her husband and her daughter moved to 40 acres of rolling hills and pine trees in rural Parker, and built a giant gray barn. They purchased a dozen horses, and put them in meticulous, neat stalls with nameplates on the doors.
Horses, though, aren’t cheap. They come with barns. They eat a lot. They require veterinarians. And Saddle Up! employs physical therapists to work with the kids. McDonald-Galbreath paid to establish the nonprofit but now depends on charitable gifts from corporations, foundations and individuals. This year, she needs to raise about $400,000. Fundraising, she said, demands a lot of her time.
Saddle Up! works with about 60 people, but McDonald-Galbreath envisions helping at least 150 suffering from a range of challenges, from muscular dystrophy to autism to the sort of emotional challenges that come with being physically or sexually abused. All of these people and more, she said, benefit from working with horses.
Hippotherapy is “the only treatment strategy therapists have where we can offer the patient three-dimensional movement as they move through space,” said Bonnie Cunningham, executive director of the American Hippotherapy Association in Indiana. “It’s more social, and it’s often outdoors.”
Robin Bowman, a longtime Colorado hippotherapy specialist who now works with Saddle Up! said horses and people have nearly identical strides: the same number of steps per minute, the same stride lengths, the same way hips rotate while walking. When you put a child on a horse “it’s reciprocal,” she said. In essence, even people who cannot walk experience what it feels like to walk, which forces them to use muscles and balance in fresh ways.
Many patients, she said, improve. People who could not lift their heads gain the control to do that. Sometimes, people unable to walk learn how.
Keeler’s mother, Lee Keeler, said hippotherapy has helped Katie get better. When she started riding, about a year ago, she had to be held up while she walked with the horse. Now, she sits up herself. Riding horses forced Katie to use long-dormant muscles, and to use them in ways they had not seen before. In addition, riding for Katie is uniquely fun.
“Picture being in a wheelchair 2 4/7,” said Lee Keeler. “Everything you do has to be controlled by other people. You don’t experience the rush little kids get when they twirl around. The other day they were learning to trot, and Katie said to me, ‘It’s like flying. It’s like being free.’ “
Douglas Brown: 303-954-1395 or djbrown@denverpost.com
More information at saddleupfoundation.org
