Fox Moon Farms employees share horse care skills with program participants. (Photo courtesy The Fox Moon Farm Project)
In the wild, herds of horses will synchronize their heartbeats to sense danger more effectively; if one pulse rate jumps up, they all feel it. When dealing with trusted humans, studies have shown, horses can also sync with people, which can, in turn, help the human calm down. According to experts, this makes horses uniquely equipped for therapeutic purposes.
It’s this feat of nature that encouraged a partnership between the local nonprofit The Fox Moon Farm Project, the Lakewood Retirement Community in western Henrico County and a Virginia Commonwealth University professor meant to study equine therapy’s effects for people with dementia or Alzheimer’s disease. The program hasn’t even hit its halfway mark yet, but early indicators suggest that horses could be a huge part of the future of treatment.
The Fox Moon Farm Project, based in King and Queen County, has been doing equine therapy work with youth for years. After a career in the corporate world, Cindy Freishtat says she and her co-founder, Maria Flint, were both ready for a new chapter in their lives, one oriented around helping others. “I reached a place where I wanted to be of service,” she says. “I wanted to give back.”
Fox Moon’s work thus far has been so effective that Freishtat, whose father suffered from dementia, wanted to see equine therapy’s results for people dealing with the disease. Lakewood was a perfect match; Executive Director Heather Crumbaugh says she had been looking for an equine therapy organization willing to work with dementia patients but that no other local place had felt equipped for it. “There’s a stigma around dementia,” Crumbaugh says. “Fox Moon Farms … was willing take this step with us.”
Interested in contributing to the worldwide development of Alzheimer’s and dementia treatment, the team at Fox Moon brought VCU psychology professor Maureen Matthews into the fold to conduct a scientific study on the program’s effects. Even in its early stages, the immediate results are significant.
The participants are Lakewood residents with advanced dementia or Alzheimer’s. Several can no longer speak, and all needed repeated reintroductions to their surroundings at first. Within a few sessions, residents were able to remember the farm and the horses when they arrived.
Crumbaugh, who was present at the first session in October 2024, says the effects have been remarkable. “I saw a lady who was nonverbal. … [By the end of the session] she was leading the horse, and she came over next to me and started talking, pointing out things like birds and flowers. … She was verbalizing things, which was a complete 180 for her.”
Anecdotally, Crumbaugh says the sessions have been reducing participants’ overall agitation, which has in turn reduced the number of psychotropic drugs they’ve needed to be prescribed.
Though the program took a break over the winter months, the study will resume this month. “I have no doubt in my mind that we are going to prove and show the effectiveness of working with horses in treating dementia,” Freishtat says. “I want to help as many people with Alzheimer’s and dementia as I possibly can.”
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