Animals are an interesting therapeutic asset. The canine therapyis for example used in certain hospitals to improve the daily life ofchildren treated for cancer. Dogs can also serve as carers for Alzheimer’s patients. But it’s not just dogs that can soothe patients in their daily lives. Illustration with Peyo, a 13-year-old stallion, who visits the sick, from children to the elderly, in various hospitals in France. Like any ordinary visitor, the horse has become accustomed to meeting the sick to do them good and help them in their daily lives. At the origin of this unusual project, Hassen Bouchakour, its owner, rider and artist. He founded the association “Les Sabots du Cœur” after noticing a capacity for empathy and a kind of sixth sense in animals. At the bedside of patients, Peyo manages to feel the patient’s fragile point and then weaves a special relationship between the stallion and the patient. “From hospital to hospital, from patient to patient, we observe each time that when there is a fairly complicated pathology, the horse goes to the limb that is sick such as the head, the heart or the legs”, explains Hassen Bouchakour in a report broadcast on the Equideo channel.
A horse with strong empathy
“They are able to read in us even before we feel things ourselves. (…) They are horses who have understood and who know how to target the fragile point in people”. In contact with Peyo, Alzheimer’s patientseven managed to suddenly regain certain memories before being overtaken by the disease, says Hassen Bouchakour.
If Peyo takes the elevator and borrows the tiled corridors of the hospital establishment without problem, this visit was not improvised. It requires the implementation of an adapted protocol, the result of four years of work and preparation. Before each visit to a hospital, the stallion is shaved, braided and dewormed. He is quarantined two days before and after each visit.
This project unites patients and their families and medical staff, who see it as a way out of the strictly therapeutic framework.*
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