Photography by Yuvie Styles
To Hockaday senior Madalena Ritz-Meuret, riding horses is more than just a hobby. It’s a way to connect with a creature that is more like us than we may think.
“It is just so amazing to be able to connect with a creature so big and to be able to practice a skill that not many people do,” Ritz-Meuret says. “Throughout the years, I have discovered how special it is to have a bond with them.”
As she prepared to enter her senior year of high school, Ritz-Meuret also got closer to another deadline: becoming an Eagle Scout.
Since the Boy Scouts of America organization began letting girls join area troops that agree to it in 2019, coed and girl’s scout troops have popped up all over the country. There are hundreds of troops in DFW, tied to neighborhood churches, schools and other local groups.
One of these is Troop 890, sponsored by Lake Highlands United Methodist Church. The troop has over 30 girls, and nearly a dozen have gone on to become Eagle Scouts. One of these is Madalena Ritz-Meuret, a rising senior at The Hockaday School.
Becoming an Eagle Scout is no small feat. It has been estimated that only 4-7% of Boy Scouts earn the Eagle Scout rank. Scouts have to be active as a Life Scout (the second highest level for scouts) for at least six months, earn a minimum of 21 merit badges, hold positions of leadership within their troop and complete a significant community service project – all before turning 18.
Ritz-Meuret recently completed her service project, which BSA describes as one of the most “distinctive and challenging aspects of becoming an Eagle Scout.” The scout has to plan, develop, lead and execute a service project that benefits their community or a nonprofit.
For Ritz-Meuret’s project, she facilitated designing and building several benches for the Heart of Texas Therapeutic Riding Center in West, Texas.
The center focuses on equine therapy, which is used to treat behavioral and relationship issues, grief, anxiety, depression, ADHD, addiction and eating disorders as well as assisting with occupational therapy and veteran reintegration.
“I wanted to pick out a center that was not publicly known to raise awareness of it and encourage clients or people interested in therapeutic riding to go there and support them,” Ritz-Meuret says.
Similar to the concept of therapy dogs, domesticated horses are thought to be attuned to human’s emotions and nonverbal cues, mirroring their rider’s emotions and allowing for the rider to engage with and identify what they were feeling. Others use horse riding to foster empathy, build trust and learn to interact with the animal calmly and safely.
The Heart of Texas Therapeutic Riding Center offers therapeutic riding with social, educational and sport opportunities, aquatic therapy, massage therapy and “elite therapy,” which includes speech, physical and occupational therapy.
After discussing the needs of the riding center with its employees, Ritz-Meuret decided to build the benches for the facility so that riders can observe their peers and have a place to sit while not riding.
Photography by Yuvie Styles
Together with a leader from the troop, Ritz-Meuret planned out the materials and funding requirements of the project. She set up a GoFundMe that collected $680 and gathered volunteers to help out. Ritz-Meuret was responsible for leading the project, even after the rain foiled the volunteers’ original plan of building the benches outside of Lake Highlands UMC.
Though adults did the sawing, Ritz-Meuret notes, she and her peers built the benches entirely by hand, adjusting along the way when things did not go to plan.
“We had to think creatively on how to work around challenges,” she says. “We made errors on measurements so we had some benches that varied in size, but it taught me to embrace the diversity of problem solving and making sure that everybody’s opinions are taken into consideration.”
She later transported the benches to the center, a little over an hour away, sanded them and applied a translucent paint to seal them once at the location.
“It’s really special to discover the different personalities that the horses have,” Ritz-Meuret says. “They have this very therapeutic power that, if you are calm around them and you’re patient with them, they will be able to reciprocate that.”
