Pet rescue works both ways

Animal healer Margrit Coates, on a visit to Ireland, explains how we can tune into animals to benefit ourselves, writes SYLVIA THOMPSON

THE HEALTH benefits from pets include relief from stress and loneliness, reduced blood pressure and cholesterol. Having a dog also increases opportunities for outdoor activity and socialisation and a study by the UK Mental Health Foundation found that pets are one of the six major factors in maintaining health of older people.

Internationally renowned animal healer Margrit Coates adds another key benefit of owning a pet; they teach us how to love unconditionally. “Loving a pet improves all your other relationships with family and friends because you learn to become happier in your own skin and not always to be seeking things for yourself,” she says.

“Pets teach people to be responsible for something other than themselves. Domestic animals don’t have a choice about where they are kept and what they are fed but they teach us patience and, by raising our consciousness to their level, we can learn to read what they are saying, thinking and feeling,” she says.

The author of four books on healing horses and Angel Pets (Rider Press), a book on communicating with pets, Coates has been a full-time animal healer for the past 12 years. She has extensively explored the physical and psychological benefits of therapeutic riding, hippotherapy (therapy aided by a horse) and equine-assisted learning for children and adults with physical and/or intellectual disabilities.

“It’s important that anyone working with horses understands their nature. Horses need the freedom to go outside every day and they need to be in a herd. They are prey animals and should never be kept on their own,” she explains. She says that it shocks her that horses are ridden when they are ill, depressed or otherwise unhappy and believes it is crucial that every horse handler tunes into the spirit of the horse.

In her book, Connecting with Horses: The Life Lessons We Can Learn from Horses (Rider Press), Coates says, “The way of the horse is to speak to hearts, minds and souls, helping improve perception, not only of ourselves but of others and inspiring us to overcome the imbalances in life.”

According to Coates, horses can help people who are troubled, sick, disadvantaged or otherwise seeking revelation. She believes that even by watching images of a horse, a deep emotional response can be triggered in people.

During a visit to the Festina Lente riding centre in Bray, Co Wicklow, Coates demonstrated her hands-on healing approach with horses. A registered member of the Healing Trust in Britain, she spends a lot of her time visiting therapeutic riding centres and working with vets who have an interest in her approach.

“Horses are the mirror of the human behaviour . They are highly sentient animals which means that they are highly reactive through their sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell and intuitively,” says Coates. “The healer connects with the source of beneficial energy that is available in the universe. It’s not airy-fairy and there are research studies that now show the transmission of energy between humans and horses,” she adds.

Coates often involves humans in what she calls “the healing loop” as she treats a horse. To do so, the person must come close to the horse and put his/her hands on it during the treatment. During her demonstration at Festina Lente, volunteers described how they experienced different bodily sensations (slowing or speeding up of heart rate and breathing, heat in the hands, and so on) when they touched the horse undergoing healing. Coates has also worked with children with disabilities, and horse owners who are themselves ill, through direct physical contact with the horse.

Jill Carey, CEO of Festina Lente, said that two horses that Coates worked on improved afterwards. “One of our miniature ponies was walking irregularly in front and, as the pony is not a riding pony, we would not tend to look that closely at her when she is walking but after the hands-on healing, she was walking with a regular step,” says Carey.

Another horse which came to Festina Lente from the Horse Welfare Trust would never stand for longer than a minute without getting agitated and wanting to walk on. “Margrit spent 30 minutes with this horse and got a strong sense of trauma from her. She showed distress signs while Margrit worked on her and then she ‘zoned out’ for around five minutes. The following week, during a long-lining session, she stood still for ages,” says Carey.

In Angel Pets, Coates says animals pick things up from people on many levels. “The human race has lost that skill, having become dependent on and distracted by verbal and written language in order to communicate,” she writes. “Animals intuitively convey truths either about themselves, their experiences or about us. Unlike us, they are not hindered by the limitations of verbal language – which can be manipulated and distorted – but live within the reality of a complex energy system of which we are all a part.” In the book, she gives details of how cats, dogs and horses have been real friends to humans in their hour of need.