An Epic Journey To New Frontiers

[Wandering Eyes]

They had grown up together, the boy and his horse. Their bond was innate. In fact, he has been told that his mother was on horseback when her waters broke. That was how it was, up in the mountains. Most people couldn't afford cars, certainly not the type that might cope with those roads.

“We lived in one of the most desolate villages in Puerto Rico,” Alberto Rullan recalls. “My dad had a small farm: coffee, bananas, plantains. And every night, I would round up the cattle into pens. If you didn't, back then, the cowboys would take them at night.”

Still bandit country, in the 1980s. But that meant Rullan was riding Tauri, daily, when both were no more than three or four years old. Looking back, Rullan learned as much about himself from Tauri as he did about horses. They were inseparable–or so he thought. Then came the day Rullan returned from school, aged eight, to be greeted in distress by his grandmother.

“A truck had hit Tauri when my dad was riding him on the road,” Rullan recalls. “My dad broke his back, spent a whole year in bed. But I was like, 'What about my horse?' My grandmother said, 'He has a broken leg. We're waiting for help.' By the next day, in the barn, I realized they'd have to put him down. There wasn't a vet in the whole district. So that day I made the decision: I would become a horse vet. I would fix horse legs. No other kid was to lose their horse, if I could help it.”

Horses culture has always taken center stage in Puerto Rico | Getty Images

Others, of course, might sooner have been prompted by his father's injury to become a doctor.

“People tell me that,” acknowledges Rullan with a smile. “But at that age, my connection with horses was everything. It was stronger than my connection with people. My whole life, all my memories growing up, had been horses. And that particular one, for me, became an idol, an icon. From that moment on, every move I made would have the same aim.”

Thirty-seven years later, despite some extreme trials on the way, the fervor of that vocation burns undimmed. Touring his Equine Performance Innovative Center (EPIC), a rehabilitation facility and clinic outside Ocala, Florida, Dr. Rullan takes out his phone and shows before-and-after images that make you gasp. While the catastrophes that have brought horses here tend to be too graphic for illustration, the gallery of outcomes is barely credible.

He shows you a shattered hock. “Week one; week six,” Rullan says, comparing two images. “To heal an injury like that, it's unheard of. This filly, now, she got into a fire. And this one, they were putting him down–just like my horse when I was a boy. But we could save him, literally removing a piece of dead bone. Look at this horse, the eye's deflated, almost gone. In other clinics, that eye would be removed. But look, after we treated it: almost normal.

“How can we do all this? Because we have all the modalities in one spot. There are very few places like this in the United States, in fact on the whole planet. There are lots of rehab centers, but this one has everything on one site, including advanced therapies: surgical suite, hyperbaric oxygen chamber, laser, pulsed electromagnetic field therapy, vibration plates. We do a lot of regenerative therapy, alternative therapies. Stem cells, PRP, amnion, ozone treatment. Combine all those, then you can get these kinds of results.”

In other words, Tauri did not die in vain. But make no mistake, getting here has been a testing odyssey.

Even to embark was difficult. There were no veterinary schools in Puerto Rico and, at that time, Rullan had neither the language nor the resources to attend one in the U.S. What he did have was a flair for mathematics, sufficient to secure a place at Penn State despite his rudimentary English. As he learned, he earned: chemistry tutor, cook, eventually crossing over to teach a program to Hispanic kids like himself. At vet school in Philadelphia, the same: since he was going to spend all his time in the library anyway, painstakingly translating textbooks and lectures, he got a job there. Additionally, as though he didn't have enough on his plate, every summer he would instruct his brother William in everything he had learned, training him up as a technician.

They were hired together in Ocala, in 2007, but then came a first serious buffet.

Thoroughbreds at the OBS Sale | OBS

“My brother got kicked by a horse,” Rullan recalls. “We get kicked all the time, and Willie's like 6'5″, 300lbs, so we keep going. But then his bruise keeps getting worse and worse, goes all the way down to the leg. Now he starts coughing, getting nose bleeds. Goes to a doctor. 'Here's a pill.' Goes again. 'Here are some steroids.' He's starting to look yellow. Goes to the emergency room and, his PCV [blood test], the normal hematocrit is about 40%, he's six. There are no blood cells in his system.”

They gave Willie an emergency transfusion, and eventually announced that he had leukemia. Everyone was flattened. They'd had so many dreams. But luckily a transfer to Shands Hospital opened the door to a stem cell experiment. A little over three months later, he was home.

For a second time, then, a mishap with a horse had contained some latent good. “If that horse hadn't kicked him, he would have died,” Rullan says. “No question.”

Not that they were out of the woods. Launching their own business in 2008, they hit the financial crisis head on. Desperate times prompted Rullan into desperate measures. He was prescribed antidepressants, but not the alcohol he combined them with. Leaving a bar one night, he raced a buddy down the highway. He never even saw the police behind him, but couldn't miss the ones who set up a roadblock in front.

“I was still in denial,” Rullan admits. “I was like, 'I only had a couple.' But then they do the test, and put the handcuffs on me. When I felt that cold metal, my heart stopped, I almost collapsed. Called my wife, told her I was in jail. She didn't flinch. She had our one-year-old child with her, and she's like, 'Okay, let's go. What do we need to do?' So she called someone, took care of the bail. She was amazing.”

His rehab journey was not always smooth, but Katie stayed strong and it is now six years since Rullan touched a drink. His routine instead became the gym, manuals in personal growth. And, step by step, the business also got onto its feet.

For a time, they rented a barn and garage in Summerfield. The brothers would alternate two-hour shifts on overnight treatments. Gradually they pieced together enough respect and momentum to buy a local farm, until a client insisted they move closer to the action, in Ocala, setting them up on a favorable rent. And eventually another one, Mike Hall of Breeze Easy, sponsored their move to what was then a layup farm: they could be his tenants until they reached a position to buy him out.

“That's the importance of collaboration, of working with really good people,” Rullan says. “Nothing can be done by yourself. So I negotiated with Mike that whenever I was ready, I could buy it. That was 2017. Everything goes well and last December our accountant told me, 'Okay, it's time to pull the trigger.'”

Thoroughbred undergoing rehab | EPIC

Rullan is rightly proud, after such a long and winding road, to have established this innovative facility.

“With all these modalities under one roof, this place gives Ocala something it never had before,” he says. “Everyone here has specialty. I have a certification in equine sports medicine that only about 100 people in the world have–from the International Society of Equine Locomotor Pathology–and can teach the same skills to all the other veterinarians, all the interns.”

Nor is EPIC simply a case of integrating services that would ordinarily require you to load your horse onto a van and drive from one specialist to another.

“I also think that other places are afraid to be so aggressive with injuries,” Rullan explains. “They view a lot of these horses as a lost cause. We have many people coming here after seeing multiple vets who only want to euthanize, or remove the eye, whatever it may be. But we have the will actually to try and move forward.”

And that is exactly what Rullan wants to do now, as proprietor, albeit in a targeted way. There would be no point renovating the training track, for instance, when Ocala already has so many. Developing a parallel canine facility, in contrast, will fill a void. Even as it stands, at any time you might find half a dozen therapies simultaneously underway here. The treatment room has a saltwater spa, an underwater treadmill, vibration plates, above all that hyperbaric chamber. A swimming pool, 100 feet long and 16 deep, is meanwhile hired out for clients to self-swim affordably.

And, just as the whole journey began with Tauri, so Rullan has a constant reminder of what animates him: an equine skeleton presiding over the lobby.

“When Katie was pregnant, there was only one horse appropriate for her to ride,” he explains. “We'd just got started, it was 2008, nobody wanted to pay for treatments. This particular horse came to our clinic with laminitis, the owner telling us to euthanize. But we had just come to town, had nothing, were virtually starving. We had to prove something. So we said, 'Why don't you just give us the horse, and we'll treat her ourselves?'

“Long story short, we treated and treated and treated that foot. And she did miraculously. Then my wife started riding her. My son was born. Everything was perfect. And then we had a storm–and the horse was struck by lightning. After going through all that. I was so upset. I said, 'You're not going anywhere. You're staying with us forever.' We had an intern at the time, who needed a project. And for many years now that horse has lived on as the educational specimen for our clinic.”

People often ask Rullan for a remote consultation, sending information and images from South America or Europe.

“And I say, 'I'm sorry, but I have to touch the horse,'” he says. “I don't know why, but I cannot treat a horse so well if I don't. Today they have all this A.I., all this software: but if I don't touch them, it's not the same.”

Perhaps that's because these horses, in aggregate, do far more for us than even the most sophisticated science can for them. So when he thinks back to the vow he made that day, as a traumatized schoolboy, Rullan can comfort himself not only that Tauri lives on through all the horses he has saved since. In the process, Tauri might also be said to be still helping people, too.

“There's a proven connection between the heart of the person and that of a horse,” Rullan remarks. “They did a study in California about this. Horses can recognize who is 'their' person, and who's not. But most of the time, believe it or not, it's the horse that actually influences the person's heart. They become synchronized: not the horse's heart synchronizing with ours, but the other way round. And, for us, getting synchronized with their hearts creates a calming effect.”

Such is the affinity that has driven this remarkable achiever past every obstacle, whether strewn by fate or his younger self.

“Everybody working here has a personal connection to the horse,” Rullan says. “We attract those kinds of people. One of our guys is 82, and gets here at 4.30 a.m. to give therapy. Everybody here, every single person, has been helped by horses.”

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