Therapeutic Driving!

Comments

John Murdoch - January 26, 2024

What a splendid post to describe the benefits of therapeutic driving!

I’m a certified therapeutic driving instructor. Can I share a secret about therapeutic driving?

Participating in practically any horse discipline costs money. Participating in driving (especially those four- and six-horse hitches!) can cost a breathtaking amount of money. But you can participate in therapeutic driving for free. Here’s how:

Depending upon the needs of each participant, a therapeutic driving lesson might require an instructor and two to four volunteers:
- The header: who leads the horse if required, and holds the horse when loading/unloading
- The whip: the trained volunteer who rides in the cart with a participant, usually with a pair of driving lines
— One or two volunteers to help get the participant into the cart or wagon (and sometimes ride in the wagon with the participant)

And we may have another volunteer assist with the lesson (setting up traffic cones, organizing games (can you play hide-and-seek with a horse-drawn wagon? Yes, you can), and other responsibilities.

We need—we always need—volunteers. You have to be at least 14 years old; you do NOT need prior experience driving horses, or even riding horses. We will teach you—to handle a horse, how to harness the horse, how to hook the cart or wagon, how to help a participant get loaded and unloaded.

The really good part? Ultimately, we need trained volunteers to drive in the cart or wagon with students—a position we call the “Able-Bodied Whip” or “ABW.” We recruit ABWs from our volunteers—when a participant can’t make a lesson, lots of times we’ll use that time to give a volunteer a lesson instead. Over time you accumulate enough experience to drive independently, and ultimately (you have to be 18, and have accumulated 50 hours of driving lessons) you can qualify as an ABW to drive with a participant in a lesson.

If you want to take a goofy picture of one of the horses to post on your Facebook page, you’ll have to buy the silly hat. Otherwise, you don’t pay anything—we provide the horses, the harness, the vehicles, the training, all of it. And the best part is that you get completely immersed in the most wonderful, most rewarding part of horsemanship there is.

To find a therapeutic driving program, go to the web site of the Professional Association for Therapeutic Horsemanship (PATH) at
https://pathintl.org/find-a-program/

Check the box for “Driving” under “Activities Offered”—you’ll see dots display on the map to the right showing every PATH-accredited program that offers therapeutic driving. Zoom in to find map points near to you, and click on a point to find contact information for the program.

We’d dearly love to hear from you.

John Murdoch
Equi-Librium, Inc.
Nazareth, Pennsylvania