Inclusive Recreation

By Jenny Ho The old adage says a dog is man’s best friend; however, for more than 7,000 people with disabilities across the UK, they are a lot more than that. To them, they are lifesavers. Assistance Dogs UK is an organization which works with eight assistance dogs charities to bring canine care to those…

By Kristin Hartness, Canines for Disabled Kids More and more often I meet people who tell me they self-trained or privately trained their service dog.  The answers I get when I ask why they chose that route vary from thoughtful and well planned choices to vague and mumbled avoided responses. Sometimes I meet people who think…

By Kristin Hartness, Canines for Disabled Kids Stop, the world is spinning with all the terms that are tossed in conversation about why someone has an animal they want to take in public. The truth is that it is often hard to figure out which animals are legal service animals with public access and which animals…

By Kristin Hartness, Canines for Disabled Kids Facilitation is when a person, usually a child under the age of 14, is placed in a 3-way service dog partnership. The child, the service dog, and a facilitator work together in public environments as a team.  The team can work in public only when all 3 partners…

A Poem by Berg Two and a half years ago, 7-year-old Berg came to Horse Boy World burdened with a diagnosis of PDD-NOS and selective mutism. Virtually non-verbal, she rarely made eye contact, would tense her body into a stiff leg/back posture, would avoid all body contact and suffered from regular, long-lasting meltdowns. She lived…

By Rupert Isaacson and Iliane Lorenz, Horse Boy World For those who read about Horse Boy Method in the August 2012 issue of The Buzz, we have some updates to share with you. As you may know, Horse Boy Method addresses Autism, not as a problem to be fixed, but as a skill set and…

By Joell Dunlap, Square Peg Foundation Square Peg Foundation helps children and adults find success, strength and inspiration within themselves through their interaction with rescue horses. In this article, we get a behind-the-scenes peek at what goes into making an Abilities Expo event like the Horse Boy Demonstration amazing. We get some funny requests from time…

Two minis walk into a hospital. The first one says to the other, I’m feeling a little hoarse. Sure, it sounds like the opener for a corny kid joke, but it really did happen at the Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. (The part about the hospital visit, not the talking.) It seems that more…