Whoa! That Feels Sooo Good

Equine Chiropractor Loves His Work on Horse Backs

When horses that perform in the arena get stiff and sore, Larry Jones applies his healing touch to help them get back on their four hooves again and put riders back in the saddle again. Photo by Mandi Roberts, Texan News Service

By Mandi Roberts

Texan News Service

Larry Jones flings a practiced arm around the horse’s thick neck. Mud-smeared fingers on one hand grasp a tangled mane while the other slides around to grab a velvety whiskered nose.

He gently pulls the head toward him, cradling it to his chest. Then he leans with his weight against the rippled stomach and rocks back, heels together, boots splayed outward. He listens for the telltale sound from the horse’s spine.

Pop. Pop.

The horse shakes and snorts. Jones’ face, a study in wrinkled concentration, melts into a grin.

“He doesn’t know what’s going on or what just happened to him,” Jones, an internationally known horse chiropractor says. “He just knows he feels good now.”

Barrel racer Amanda Porter can see a big difference in her horse. That same morning she had not been able to pick up his back leg because of his pain.

“He’s a lot less stressed around his face and eyes,” she says. “He looks so much more relaxed.”

Jones, a boyish-looking 48-year-old man, stands in a stall with blue jeans tucked deep into tall, faded boots. Suddenly his shoulders lurch up and his neck dives down and he paws the air with his arms.

“Well, you were making him run barrels like this,” he says. “His neck was scrunched up like an accordion. Now that I loosened that up, he has the range of motion he needs to perform and feel his best.

“A performance horse is an athlete,” Jones adds. “And just like humans, they get sore and out of line, and their muscles and joints need to be stretched and aligned. That is where I come in.”

But human athletes do not have 1,200 pounds of muscle and sinew surrounding bones that need to be realigned. Jones, who played professional hockey for the Portland Winter Hawks in the 1970s, simply grasps the back hoof of a horse in a clutch hold.

“You don’t have push and force a huge animal into position, you just have to position it and it will adjust itself,” Jones says.

Wesley Robinett, Jones’ 23-year-old assistant, demonstrates by taking hold of the halter and bringing the horse forward so that the other leg has to come up, resulting in an adjustment.

Jones looks for signs of muscle atrophy caused by loss of circulation when joints get locked up. As cowboys roll out horses from trailers like a NASCAR crew on raceday, he recognizes a horse’s hopping instead of stepping as a sign of stiffness or slipped vertebrae.

“Every performance horse is sore; I haven’t ever found one that isn’t,” Jones says. “It’s like a racecar; it’s gonna use up some tires during performance. You’re gonna have to change the oil and the belt, keep the piano keys in tune to play great music and keep a horse limber to make the moves it needs to make.”

After 17 years as a vagabond, self-taught horse chiropractor working a rodeo circuit and racetracks out of a 1959 GMC Greyhound Wildrose bus, Jones has built up a steady, worldwide clientele within the horse community. He has performed over 36,000 treatments in nine countries.

“I’ve worked on polo and training horses, and I adjust $15 million syndicated racehorses to backyard ponies -- it doesn’t matter,” Jones says.

In the wild, horses roll to keep their backs aligned naturally. But living a penned-up life, performance horses can’t always do that.

“What I want to do is help them get their natural spinal alignment back that they would have if they were in nature, because that is when they can feel and perform their best,” Jones says.

Recently, Jones gave the bus and a life of constant roaming to his friend, horse therapist Rio King, in exchange for a ranch home in Stephenville, the so-called “Cowboy Capital of the World,” which he shares with his wife,

“I still travel a lot to do adjustments, but also work out of my own corrals,” he says. “And I work a market I developed from the ground up.”

That market consists mostly of customers in the United States which Jones regards as the “horse marketplace and where many of the major competitions are located.” But Jones began the early stages of his career in hometown Alberta, Canada, where he still goes back annually to work the second most watched sport in Canada —chuckwagon races.

“Growing up, I never had a horse, so I worked at a stable and feedmill,” Jones says with an accent that’s a blend of Canadian and Southern. “When I was 12 or 13 I wanted to ride a horse really badly, but the guy I worked for said I was too big to be a jockey. So they let me water and feed the horses instead.”

His equine care expanded to a career as a horse masseuse. In1984 he developed a human massager into a similar, larger version for horses and called it a “thumper.” That also became his nickname.

“I’m probably one of few people that know and call Larry by his real name,” Robinett admits. “We go to rodeos and of course we don’t walk. Larry has to ride mopeds all over the arena grounds. And as we zip around we hear, ‘Thumper! Hey there, Thumper!’ And soon we are adjusting horses by request.”

The horse world can thank the thumper—and a fortuitous accident—for many of the modern techniques used in horse chiropracy.

“Make Larry tell you about how he adjusted his first horse!” Robinett says, slapping Larry on the back. “No, I want to tell. Larry had a horse’s back leg stretched out and his assistant was massaging the horse with a thumper when a really pretty girl walks by. The distracted assistant dropped the machine, bent down to pick it up, and spooked the horse a little. When the horse took a step, its vertebrae popped into alignment. It was Larry’s first adjustment.”

“It’s true,” Jones says, “So I went from there and based my techniques off of that observation.”

Jones never had formal training because the field of equine chiropracy is so new.

“I learned everything I know from working right with the animal and from observation and trials,” he says. “Every day is a new learning experience if you are ready for it. Adjusting a horse involves lots of feel and listening to what the horse tells you is wrong with him. That’s where I got my teaching—from the horses.”

His mission statement is about more than a career—it’s Jones’ life project.

“I’ve made a profession helping horses feel better, but I do all I do and what I do because I love it,” Jones adds. “My heart ain’t in it except to help the horses.”

The Texan News Service is a project of the Tarleton State University journalism program.