A Good, Sweet Story

I was afraid of horses my whole life, but when I acquired a Gordon Setter that had great field trial potential, I decided I better get a horse, the easiest way to chase her around. I now have four horses, approximately three too many, but they have fundamentally changed my life. You know the studies that show how petting a dog or cat can lower your blood pressure, your heart rate, your respiration rate? Well, think about standing in the midst of two Tennesee Walkers & two Spotted Saddle horses. Two tons or so of beautiful medication. I should blog my guys someday. Someday soon. But here is a story about horses & wounded soldiers from Iraq, Bu$hCo's war of choice. Whoever came up with this therapy ought to be president, because this person has a heart.

Spec. Maxwell Ramsey made small kissing sounds as he tried to coax Wylie, a muscular black Percheron horse, over to the platform where the soldier stood. He swung the metal and plastic limb that is his new left leg over Wylie's back and sat down in the saddle.

"Relax your leg. Take a deep breath. Remember you are sitting on a big old cushion," Mary Jo Beckman, a therapeutic riding instructor, said to Ramsey as he and Wylie headed out into a dusty yard at Fort Myer.

The black and white horses that usually pull caissons during military funerals at neighboring Arlington National Cemetery are helping soldiers such as Ramsey in their long struggle to learn to walk again, to regain strength and to believe in their new limbs.

"It gives me the confidence to know that I lost an arm and a leg but not the ability to do certain things," 1st Lt. Ryan Kules, 25, a Tempe, Ariz., native who was injured by a roadside bomb in Iraq in November, said Friday.