National HBPA Conference Concludes with Talks on Aftercare and New Technology

[Wandering Eyes]

The annual National Horsemen's Benevolent and Protective Association Conference concluded Wednesday in Safety Harbor, Florida with a session on how retired racehorses are transforming the lives of first responders and military members, as well as school children of backstretch workers, and a session  showcasing products using cutting edge technology to provide 24/7 security for stables and state-of-the-art software to help trainers do their jobs.

Sally Jane Mixon, a Canterbury Park backstretch chaplain, exercise rider and mental-health counselor with a BS in Human Development Studies and an MS in Professional Counseling, as well as certifications as an equine specialist and mental-health professional, discussed her more than two decades incorporating off-the-track racehorses to help military and first responders suffering from stress, anxiety, coping struggles and other mental-health challenges.

“The thing about talk therapy is it doesn't work for everybody. It didn't work for me,” she said. “I almost died of anorexia in my college years, a long time ago. I never half-assed anything, being the daughter of a Marine, so I was a really good anorexic…. So much therapy when you're talking with people, if you don't trust people, it's not going to work. For me, the horses saved my life at a really young age. I grew up riding. I was 5 years old, fell off my first horse and I was hooked. Horses have an innate ability to heal.”

Using her therapeutic model Abijah, Mixon pairs a mental-health professional at a Master's level and an equine specialist with a minimum of 4,000 hours per dynamic.

“Abijah's is the bridge between a racing industry and community wellness, pairing off-track Thoroughbreds with professional counselors,” she said. “We meet the mental health needs on the backside communities of the tracks to the front lines where our first responders and military serve…. These incredible animals are so intuitive. They're going to pick up what's going on internally and they play it out. This works, and it's completely mind-blowing. My job is to watch miracles.”

Mixon said she believes the program's results are so powerful that it will transform, not just participants, but the image of horse racing.

“We're going to do it at racetracks or farms around racetracks,” she said. “That's going to give incredible PR for racetracks. It's going to become known for saving lives, horses and humans. We're not going to be talking about breakdowns. We're going to be talking lifting people up, lifting horses up. We're meeting the need in a really unique way.”

The Abijah's program expanded with a youth component at Canterbury Park when it joined forces with Furlong Learning as a summer program for the school kids of backstretch workers.

The concluding session of the National HBPA conference was titled “Helping Horsemen Through Today's Technology” and featured Jeff DeAngelis, head of sales for Horcery, and Michael Novak, a technologist and software engineer entrepreneur who founded Backstretch, a web-based management platform for horse-racing stables.

Horcery, a new National HBPA corporate sponsor, produces the Stall Monitor, a cutting-edge system that provides 24/7 monitoring with AI-enabled cameras and real-time alerts. Horcery bills the system as helping to protect equine investments, improve stable management and ensure horse safety while empowering horsemen to reduce risks and optimize performance.

“It's an AI that learns your horse's behavior from the minute they step in the stall,” DeAngelis said. “If there are any deviations, any anomaly, it will actually set that off and you will get a customized alert to your phone to let you get out there before an accident turns into an emergency situation.

“With everything going on, regulations changing, there's more of a need than ever to have something like this in all of your stalls… The traditional CCTV cameras were fine in their time. They simply record and you can go back and view data, but it doesn't actually help you get ahead of a problem. Now this is a real solution. We built it out of necessity. It's there to protect the welfare of the horse, as well as to protect the horsemen who care for those horses.”

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