November 16, 2009

At this year’s Melbourne Writers’ Festival, I had the pleasure of meeting author of The Horse Boy, Rupert Isaacson.

Isaacson and his wife Kristin Neff discovered that their son Rowan was autistic when he was two-and-a-half. What started as an endless round of behavioural therapies, conventional and complementary treatments, not to mention high stress levels, eventually turned into a journey of healing and adventure.

As you may guess from the title of the book, animals – particularly horses – have played a vital role in Rowan’s education and path to living a full and meaningful life. Although an ex-professional horse trainer, Isaacson deliberately kept Rowan away from horses considering them too dangerous. But Rowan found his own way to horses by running into a neighbour’s paddock (in Austin, Texas) and prostrating himself at the foot of a bay mare, Betsy. Strangely, the normally feisty mare adopted a stance of voluntary obeisance and merely nuzzled the four-year-old child.

Rowan’s extraordinarily close relationship with the horse and his love of animals – both toy and real – is one of the reasons why Rupert decides to take his family on a healing adventure to Mongolia; birthplace of both horses and traditional shamanic medicine. As well as spending most of the journey on horseback, they encounter deer, ibex, reindeer, goats and other animals that delight Rowan.

Before embarking on their trip, Isaacson visits adult autist and professor of animal sciences at Colorado State University, Dr. Temple Grandin, to learn more about how animals can act as the connecting point between the ‘normal’ human world and the autistic world.

“Because animals think the same way – visually – autistic people often connect well with animals. When they’re young they sometimes communicate what they want to say to their fellow humans through the medium of an animal, especially an animal they are close to,” explains Temple Grandin.

A few months after interviewing Isaacson, I was fascinated to read a newspaper article about a severely autistic Melbourne boy, Simon, who is being helped by a specially trained autistic dog. The golden retriever – Galaxy – provides support, comfort and emotional focus. The dog seems to sense when Simon is on the point of having a tantrum (which in autism terms is all about crossed wires and messages in the brain), and will cuddle him putting his paws around Simon’s neck.

Not everyone with an autistic child can ride across Mongolia on horseback or afford to buy and keep an autistic dog, but it is clear that spending time in the natural world and bonding with animals has great benefit for autistic people.

To read my interview with Rupert Isaacson, go to: http://www.novamagazine.com.au/article_archive/2009/2009-11-ahealingalchemy.htm

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