Rescue animals 'know suffering' — and that's why they're changing lives
Psychologist and grief counselor Joanne Cacciatore named her rescue horse Chemakoh, a Pima (Native American) term that refers to two souls that come together in destiny. Though she’d had zero experience with horses before his arrival, she began to love and nourish him back to health — and so did her clients, bereaved parents who would come to see Cacciatore at her Sedona, Ariz., home office for intense private sessions, and soon find themselves drawn to the rescued horse in her backyard.
“They would go out to his paddock, and they would stand at his fence and just cry. Bring him carrots and just cry. And I could see this connection,” Cacciatore’s says. “People said, ‘Look what he looks like now. Look at what love can do, look what compassion can do’ — and they started seeing themselves in this horse. And I’m like, ‘Oh, there’s something really important happening here.’”
Seeing those connections, fostered between grieving humans and the badly abused horse, was ultimately what led Cacciatore to the idea of opening the Selah House Respite Center and Care Farm, on land embraced by canyons and pine thickets and the iconic red rock mountains. Just five months in and not yet fully up and running, the care farm is already home to a fast-growing menagerie of rescued horses, sheep, dogs, and (so far just one) pig. And it is a unicorn of a place, where people can come and find solace after suffering the death of a loved one, often through bonding with an animal, such as Chemakoh, who truly seems to understand.
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