| NAME: | Molly |
| SPECIES: | Pony of the Americas |
| DATE: | 2005 |
| LOCATION: | St. Rose, Louisiana |
| SITUATION: | Three-legged horse with a prosthesis |
| WHO WAS SAVED: | Handicapped people and children |
| LEGACY: | National icon of New Orleans’ post-Katrina recovery, became beloved therapy animal |
In late August 2005, as Hurricane Katrina bore down on coastal Louisiana and Mississippi, many people heeded evacuation orders and scattered north (for the story of one person who didn’t, see page 43). In their haste, they left behind many things, including pets and animals they couldn’t take with them.
One left-behind animal was fifteen-year-old Molly, a small gray-speckled Pony of the Americas (which is a cross between an Appaloosa and a Shetland pony). Untethered and untrailered, Molly survived the storm unharmed. Afterward, however, her owners were unable to care for her, and they gave her to Kaye Harris, who ran a pony farm in St. Rose, Louisiana. Kaye was rescuing all sorts of abandoned animals in the wake of the natural disaster.
Rather than a happy ending, however, this is when Molly’s luck went south.
THE WILL TO LIVE
This story is about the unquenchable spirit of a rare individual, and it begins with Molly’s indominatible will to live when she suffered perhaps the worst handicap that can befall a horse.
A few months after Molly’s arrival, Kaye returned to her ranch to a horrific sight: One of her rescued animals, a pit bull who had shown no previous signs of aggression, was viciously attacking Molly.
Molly’s flank, neck, face, and all four legs were severely lacerated; one leg was chewed to the bone. Kaye immediately intervened, but Molly’s injuries were so grave she thought it was too late.
“He gnawed on this pony like a meat grinder,” Kaye said.
However, Kaye is not a person to give up on animals. She found another home for the pit bull, rather than euthanize him, and she and her vet, Dr. Allison Barca, worked to heal Molly’s wounds.
Everything healed successfully except for Molly’s right front foreleg, which was too damaged to recover. The only option was to amputate and fit the horse with a prosthetic. “This is almost never done,” said Dr. Barca. “It’s so expensive and so hard, and everyone who tries fails.”
Nevertheless, they contacted Dr. Rustin Moore, director of the Equine Health Studies Program at the Louisiana State University School of Veterinary Medicine. Dr. Moore was skeptical and said that euthanizing Molly was probably the most humane option.
“We said look, just meet Molly,” Kaye said. “It wasn’t going to be me who convinced them. It was going to be her.”
So Dr. Moore and his team observed Molly and came away impressed. “She’s very intelligent,” Dr. Moore said, “and she knows how to take care of herself. She made it obvious she understood that she was in trouble.”
Dr. Moore approved the surgery, which went off without a hitch. A one-of-a-kind prosthesis was created. The only question was, would Molly accept it?
“Let me tell you,” Kaye said, “most horses would feel that thing on and try to get away from it. Not her. She felt it and went, ‘Oh, a leg.’ Boom, went walking straight off. I just cried because I knew it was going to work.”
Ultimately, Molly’s prosthesis evolved through three different versions, but throughout the ordeal, Molly amazed everyone. Dr. Moore said, “Molly happened to be a one-in-a-million patient. She’s tough as nails but sweet, and she was willing to cope with pain.”
A SYMBOL OF NEW ORLEANS
In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Molly’s unusual story made national news.
“To me, she is a symbol of New Orleans,” said Kaye in 2006. “You know, if you ask me, New Orleans had its leg chopped off, but it can survive. That is the spirit of New Orleans, and this city can come back. Molly has come back. She’s not back to normal; she’s gonna be better.”
At the time, this sounded like a hopeful boast. Molly’s story was heart-warming, but how could life as a lame three-legged pony be an improvement?
Yet that’s how it turned out.
First of all, Molly adapted to and adopted the prosthesis as her own. “She asks for it,” said Dr. Barca. “She’s amazing. She will put her little limb out and come to you and let you know that she wants you to put it on. Sometimes she wants you to take it off, too.”
Not only that, she didn’t let it slow her down.
“Occasionally she will drag your butt down the levee,” Dr. Barca said. “She’ll tow you! It can be pretty bad when you can’t catch a three-legged horse.”
This kind of determination can’t be taught, and Kaye knew Molly was special.
“It’s important to understand that the will of the animal has a lot to do with it,” Kaye said. “The animal has to participate in her own survival. That’s very like people. If you don’t participate in your own survival, in your own therapy, you’re not going to go anywhere. And that’s the point about her, she never gave it up.”
Kaye feels strongly that all people, all beings, have a duty to give back to society, and she had a sense what work Molly might be fit for.
Again, the only question was, would she take to it?
TENDING TO THE WOUNDED
One day Kaye and Dr. Barca took Molly to a local children’s hospital. A group of children coping with various issues was brought to an outdoor courtyard to pet the horse. One encounter stood out from the rest.
A boy who’d recently had a brain operation was wheeled next to Molly’s face.
“His head is thrashing wildly and they say, ‘Oh, he can’t control it,’” Kaye recalled. “He gets up next to Molly. His head goes—whoop. Her eye’s right there, and his head stops dead, deliberately. They stay looking at each other for three minutes. Molly doesn’t move a muscle.”
Dr. Barca reached over and placed the boy’s hand on Molly’s nose. “Again,” Kaye said, “the kid supposedly can’t control his limbs. He keeps it there for a whole minute.”
When the hospital visit was over, and the kids had gone back inside, Kaye and Dr. Barca led Molly away, only to have her drag them back up the pathway. Kaye yelled at her to stop, figuring she wanted to eat the grass, but Molly returned to the empty courtyard. Only after a lot of convincing that the kids were truly gone would Molly agree to leave.
In this way, Molly seemed to embrace a new calling. Kaye founded the nonprofit Molly’s Foundation, and through it, she brings Molly to visit children and adults coping will all sort of disabilities. In these encounters, Molly dispenses a type of inspirational healing that Kaye half-jokingly calls “Molly magic.”
Kaye is emphatic that it’s Molly who pursues these interactions. “Things like that have happened to me over and over and over again with her. Where I know it’s not just me saying, ‘Oh look, you’re a celebrity. Let’s go.’ No. This is her choice. Over and over again in our visits, she chooses to stay. She’ll pick out a person, and she won’t move until I get that person to come up. I just listen to her.”
When people train therapy animals, they select them carefully. They discern which animals have the right temperament and ability for therapeutic work, and they weed out the many who don’t display the right aptitude, demeanor, or focus. But perhaps people aren’t the only ones choosing. Many stories in this book, like Molly’s, involve animals who apparently choose to work with a particular person or in a particular therapeutic way. Perhaps these animals agree to be trained, and are successful at it, because the affinity and desire already exist.
No one trained Molly for therapy work, and no one had to convince her to want to help people with disabilities.
“I think she has that empathy,” Kaye said. “And I think she knows. I think there’s some wavelength that reaches out from her and touches these people. Cause I see people go to absolute goo when they meet her.”
Dr. Moore said, “She survived the hurricane, she survived a horrible injury, and now she is giving hope to others.”
OXYTOCIN: THE BIOLOGY OF GOOD FEELINGS
Why does touch feel so good? How is it possible that simply petting another animal—such as a horse like Molly or a dog like Cheyenne (see page 141)—can have such positive emotional and therapeutic benefits?
One answer is oxytocin. This potent chemical is released whenever we pet an animal, which also releases dopamine and beta endorphins. These chemicals help increase our sense of well-being: They lower our heart rate and blood pressure, and decrease the production of stress hormones. Studies have shown that petting a dog doubles a person’s oxytocin levels.
As researcher Meg Daley Olmert writes in her book Made for Each Other, oxytocin “makes people more trusting and more trustworthy. It can even relieve some of the antisocial tendencies of autistics.”
Further, oxytocin is produced in both the animal being petted and the one doing the petting. This seems to confirm what most of us have known all along: Our companion animals enjoy being petted as much as we enjoy wrapping our arms around them.
Oxytocin has long been recognized as essential to creating our “maternal instincts” (see page 41), but as Olmert writes, it’s now believed to be “at the heart of the human-animal bond” and “squarely behind the domestication of animals.”
Anthropologist Pat Shipman agrees. In her book The Animal Connection, Shipman writes, “I would argue that we love animals and find companionship and joy in their presence because we have evolved to be connected to animals,” and that the “main biological ingredient” behind this is oxytocin.
Over millennia, animals have deeply influenced human evolution (see page 244). In the here and now, animals provide healing by their presence and contact alone. That might sound romantic, but oxytocin reveals that there is, Olmert writes, a “physiological reality of why animals can love us, why we can love them, and why that love is so good for everyone it touches.”