Ten years ago, Dawn Samuelson and her husband transformed the family dairy farm into a horse-training program, and then five years ago added a life skills program to the mix.
The Grandview Farms Training Academy in Bemus Point, New York helps not only to train horses, but also train the riders on how to communicate with their horses.
“One thing that makes us extremely unique is that we don’t just train the horses; we train the riders to be a partner, unlike some places were you just come in, hug up on their back and just ride along – that’s not what we do,” Samuelson said. “We want to teach them about understanding the needs of the horse and how to communicate (and) how to watch their body language to anticipate a problem. So it goes a little deeper than your traditional riding academy.”
To do this, Samuelson does a lot of evaluations on the horse to understand its personality and its problems, but most of the time the problem comes from the communication between the horse and the rider.
Then, five years ago, Samuelson expanded the business to include “Through the Horse’s Eyes,” which is four different life skills/character building programs geared toward different areas: corporate, empowering women, family and youth.
“We go into schools, go to business … where we actually use horses to teach about trust, respect, communication and working together. We do that with a series of tasks they do hands-on participation with,” Samuelson said.
The program has been occurring in many different places across the western New York region and northern Pennsylvania, but now Through the Horse’s Eyes is in cooperation with St. Bonaventure University and is starting a yearlong pilot program at Orchard Park schools.
The program will have an assembly for students and parents, as well as an in-service day for faculty wherein teachers will leave school to participate in different activities that will enhance trust and cooperation between colleagues.
“A horse becomes a very dramatic mirror of our behavior and it’s teaching what we call ‘taking off your emotional coat,’ which teaches ownership, it teaches trust, it teaches communication – both verbal and non verbal … (the horses are) helping us to see ourselves and how we react based on the way they respond,” Samuelson said.
Teachers will also take part in a web program that features Stewart, an animated horse who helps teachers along the way.
For in-service days, whether it’s for teachers, businesses or any other type of organization, people can enjoy Through the Horse’s Eyes at five different locations throughout the region: Bradford, Buffalo, Gowanda, Hamburg Fairgrounds and right here at Grandview Farms Training Academy in Bemus Point.
Samuelson came up with the idea as a way to increase business while working around her busy schedule. Since 6 months old, her son Ryan has been living with polycystic kidney disease. At 4-years-old he received a living kidney transplant from his father, and part of a liver from his aunt a couple years later.
During that surgery, however, Ryan lost the kidney donated to him by his father. Now Ryan is receiving dialysis three times a week. The Samuelson family is currently looking for an O positive donor.
Samuelson’s emotional coat resulted from these types of struggles and still persists today, but now she knows how to take off her emotional coat and persevere to make her life the best she can. With the knowledge she has gained, she is now using that to her advantage and helping others take off their coats.
“I’m hoping that it’s a lifelong change of behavior (for people) – that they can actually step back with their emotional coat and be able to take ownership of different problems in their life and be able to remove the coat when need be and put on the coat when need be and give them that part of their future,” Samuelson said.
Samuelson believes that Through the Horse’s Eyes can become a national program. The one-of-a-kind program has already started to receive national attention when it was featured in Country Women magazine last year.
This year there have also been talks of Samuelson and her program appearing on the Today show; however, that is still in the works, Samuelson said.
Her ultimate goal is for Through the Horse’s Eyes to be sold nation-wide as a package, where people all over the country come to Grandview Farms to be trained to operate the program as she does.
“Everybody has things that get in the way of life … but they doesn’t have too,” Samuelson said.
For more information about Samuelson and her program, visit www.throughthehorseseyes.org.
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