The enjoyment equine that massage therapist Lizanne Quinn gets from calming a nervous horse nearly equals that of the patient.
By BILL COATS
Published May 2, 2003
[Times photos: Janel Schroeder-Norton]
At the Star Valley Farm in San Antonio, Lizanne Quinn massages the left leg of former racehorse Slew, a 9-year-old thoroughbred, while his owner, Deidre Tyrrell, 26, watches.
Slew's treat: a gum massage.
Kelly Peacock, 21, walks Slew after his massage.
Lizanne Quinn works on Slew's left hind quarters.
LUTZ - The client weighed about 1,200 pounds. Yet the rubbing, kneading, pounding and slow jabbing from Lizanne Quinn's hands were having a clear effect.
Slew's mahogany-colored eyelids slid downward. His nose became runny. His tongue slithered between his teeth. His head sank. His breathing began to sound like snoring.
"He's all loosey-goosey now," marveled Deirdre Tyrrell, 26, of San Antonio, owner of the 9-year-old thoroughbred.
A good question at that point might have been: Who was happier, Slew or Ms. Quinn?
Ms. Quinn, a 41-year-old mother of three, gave up a legal assistant's steady income to enter a new field, horse massage. The work is nowhere near full time, but it lets Ms. Quinn spread good feelings to horses, a species she has loved since childhood.
"The first time they look at me like they're saying "How did you know to do that?' - that's what makes it all worthwhile," she said. "They give me back way more that I give them."
The migraine headaches Ms. Quinn suffered in law offices occur less often in barns.
"If I go to work on a horse, it always goes away," she said.
Ms. Quinn has joined a field that's only a generation old, at least in public.
Before then, it was secretive, said Matthew Mackay-Smith, a former veterinary surgeon who now is medical editor of EQUUS, a magazine about horse care. Mackay-Smith said the topic "came out of the closet" around the late 1970s.
"People aren't embarrassed any more to admit that they're spending a little bit of their money to give their horse this kind of attention," he said.
Horse massage is a growing field, and the comfort it provides for horses that race or perform is recognized, Mackay-Smith said.
Three years ago, Ms. Quinn became a certified equine massage therapist by attending a weeklong course at a Virginia massage school. She learned to manipulate a horse with her arms, while applying leverage from the rest of her body. Then she returned to her barn near Lutz's Lake Park and went to work.
The first massages may have helped the horses, but they left Ms. Quinn with aching arms, shoulders and neck. "I couldn't even lift a fork for like four days," she said.
She has done nearly 350 massages since, earning $80 apiece.
It looks easy, yet is forceful. Frequently, pressure by Ms. Quinn's thumb or fingertips at a given point on Slew's body would cause huge muscles to quiver several feet down his flanks.
"It's all about leverage," she said.
Ms. Quinn began at Slew's mane, a foot behind the ears, kneading the neck muscles with her palms and fingers. She worked down Slew's left side to his leg, then toward his rump and back up the right side. She felt muscle spasms and knots and broke them up. She detected sore spots.
"He has got his tail like buried up underneath here," Ms. Quinn said, working on Slew's right rump. "This is so sore."
Like other racehorses, Slew trembled when Ms. Quinn touched his belly where saddle girths had been repeatedly tightened. But after a previous massage, Slew already discarded a gait problem that had caused his rump to swing to the right.
That won over Ms. Tyrrell, who rehabilitates racehorses and horses that have been mistreated. She retrains them for hunting or the controlled steps of dressage.
"To be honest, at first I was skeptical," she said. "But I had one horse that was walking crooked, and now he's straight, and I had another horse that was nervous, and now she's relaxed."
The "relaxed" horse was Eve, a 6-year-old thoroughbred mare Ms. Tyrrell bought four months earlier. She was more relaxed around Ms. Quinn than during a previous massage, but still was edgy.
Pressing a sensitive spot could provoke tentative kicks by Eve, so Ms. Quinn sometimes held a fist next to Eve's rear leg muscle for early kick detection.
When Ms. Quinn goes home, another barn awaits. She owns three horses and boards four more. Her daughter, Mallory, rides. Ms. Quinn's favorite horse, Bailey, "pretty much rules my life," she said.
With Bailey, Ms. Quinn is a therapist receiving therapy. She has ridden him through the trails of Lake Park at night. She could identify her horses by smell alone: Meadow's breath, Capone's lips, Bailey's mane.
"When I'm sad, I go smell his breath," she said. "It's intoxicating."
