Emma Massingale is sitting in her living room, explaining how she persuaded a horse to lie down under her Christmas tree. 'Tom looked at the lights of the Christmas tree and I asked him to lie down under it,' she says, smiling. 'He wasn't sure there was enough room and I had to prove to him there was.'
Eventually, Tom lay down and was photographed for Emma's Christmas card. 'It is the first time that a horse has lain down on a rug for me,' she says. 'Getting a horse to lie down means he is laying down his life for you.'
Emma is an equine psychologist — a horse whisperer. At her farm in Bradworthy, Devon, she heals the horses the world has given up on — the difficult, the dangerous and the angst-ridden.
And as I, a city girl used to rancid pigeons and spoilt cats, wander down the damp lane to see this Dr Freud for the four-legged, I wonder what I will find.
Is Emma's farm the horse equivalent of the Priory Hospital, but with self-absorbed horses, rather than tired celebrities?
Emma grew up in Surrey, and when she was 14 a crisis hit. Her mother walked out and Emma's solace was a big black horse called Kariba.
'I would sit in the field with him all day, reading,' she says. 'I would sleep in the stable with him at night. The horses became a safe haven for me.' Kariba was her first horse love — and her first horse problem. 'Kariba had a lot of issues,' she says.
She took him to the Pony Club, but he was too big and troubled for their tastes. 'They told me I would never get anywhere with him and that I should sell him. So, I decided the Pony Club could take a hike. And Kariba became my life. He started it all.'
When she was 18, Emma went to Australia to live on a horse farm, where she was taught to understand the psyche of each horse — 'they treat horses differently out there', she explains — and when she returned she began to establish her horse hospital where, for £120 a week (it's very cheap — would she take my family?) she tries to heal their pain.
'I am the last stop,' she says. 'Owners will try everything else first because I am so far from conventional training techniques.' She giggles. 'It's like people being afraid to see counsellors.'
So how does she do it? Emma, 24, who is engaged to businessman Jeremy, looks deeply normal and speaks in the ringing tones of the middle-class shires; she does-n't look like a woman who can see into the soul of a horse.
'Horses can only have a certain number of issues,' she explains. The issues are: refusal to get into a trailer, refusal to get out of a trailer, refusing to be ridden and, basically, refusing to fit in with the agendas of their human owners.
The way Emma tells it, horse problems are not horse problems. They are human problems dumped onto a horse.
TO DO her work, Emma tries to see the world through a horse's eyes.
'Paradise for a horse is to be in a field with his friends,' she explains.
'You have to remember that. I ride in competitions, but I know it isn't important to the horses. It is important to me.'
But in Jilly Cooper novels, I gasp (everything I know about animals comes from Jilly Cooper novels) — the horses love it when they win Olympic gold, don't they?
'Safety, comfort, play and food,' Emma says. 'Nothing else is important to a horse. They do not care about rosettes. People care about rosettes.'
Horses are cowardly (they are prey animals) claustrophobic, and don't care about material things. 'If we had a storm and I opened the stable doors, not one of them would stay inside because they would rather be in the field. I can help horses with big problems because I always keep that in mind.'
She tells me about the horses she saved. Shadrack, an enormous seven-year-old bay thoroughbred, was a horse who would not stop rearing.
When he came 18 months ago he was 'really naughty'. He wouldn't let his owner ride him. He wouldn't leave the yard. (Nor would he tidy his stable and he was red-eyed, sullen and non-communicative.)
Spoilt rotten
Emma interviewed the owner and realised that Shadrack's issue was this — he had always lived with his mother and sister and was, basically, spoilt rotten.
But Emma had a plan. She turned him out with Kariba and Shadrack got a reality check, horse style. Essentially, Emma sent him to boarding school.
'They taught him he wasn't the king of the herd,' she says. 'His attitude shifted from being "I am God's gift and I am not doing anything", to "oh my God, please save me from the other horses, they are picking on me".'
Shadrack learned his place in the pecking order, and when Emma retrieved him from this terrifying world of not being worshipped, he was ready to be healed.
Emma was no longer a human enemy, but a friend who would save him from Kariba. Using kindness, firmness, body language and a carrot-and-stick technique, she taught him 'to move his feet where I wanted them to be. I did everything I could think of to establish that I was the leader in our herd and he was the follower.
'He learned quickly that he had to yield to pressure — from me or from the horses.' If Shadrack went back to his bad ways, Kariba would glare, bite, reverse on him 'and boot out with both hind legs'. And the horse that had always reared never reared again. He is, says Emma, 'happier now'.
The next patient on Dr Emma's list was Moby, aged three, from Ireland. Moby had never been ridden and 'was scared of everything'. Emma's face darkens as she says 'I don't know his history but if I had to guess I would say someone did something to him. 'He had some trauma in his life.'
She thinks it is likely that he was 'backed' (it used to be called 'broken in') in the old fashioned way — 'tied to a post and sat on until his spirit was broken and he didn't struggle any more'. This is anathema to Emma's teaching — she prefers to 'work with them and get them to accept it rather than force them to deal with it'.
Moby was particularly anguished during visits to the farrier, to have his shoes nailed on. 'He wouldn't let you hold his foot up and he would kick out at you. It was horrible to watch,' she says. Emma tried to 'find a way to re-establish some kind of trust between him and people'.
Again, she used faithful Kariba. 'I knew that when Moby and Kariba were close, Moby would feel safe,' she explains. 'Kariba and Moby were a herd and Kariba would reassure Moby in a way no human ever could.'
With Emma sitting on Kariba, Moby learned to stand still with his fear, because the human threat was dissipated by Kariba's warmth towards Emma. 'Within a month we were able to shoe him confidently,' she says.
Moby, too, is a happier horse today. 'But I am sure he will never forget (the abuse),' Emma says. 'If someone got cross with him for not standing still for the farrier, I am sure he would revert to being wild quite quickly.'
Then there is Kizzy, the horse who went from zero to hero in the horse asylum. Kizzy, at 13, had never been broken in and she was, says Emma, 'difficult and dangerous. She wouldn't let anyone on her'. She says backing a 13-year-old horse is similar to trying to teach a 45-year-old man how to ride a bicycle.
'We are lucky that horses are so willing'
'We had to teach Kizzy how to accept a saddle and a girth, and the weight of a rider. We are lucky that horses are so willing.'
Finally, Emma moves on to her greatest success — the horse who trusts her enough to lie down in a living room. Emma found Tom in the ring at a show-jumping competition two years ago, carting a girl called Rhiannon across the jumps. 'It was like watching a fight,' she says.
HE HAD repeatedly thrown her and even left her scarred for life. Later, when Emma went to the stable where he was being 'trained', she stepped in and calmed him down, but they wouldn't let her help.
'They weren't showing him any compassion,' she says. It was 'the horse should do this, the horse should do that'.
Tom and Rhiannon arrived 18 months ago and together the three of them worked in 'snow, hail and thunder'. using '100 per cent body language' and her curious gift for empathy, Emma worked 'on making him feel safe'.
She read Tom and realised a little manipulation would do it. She kept her distance and Tom 'kept wanting to come back'. After a while, the training ropes were thrown off. And today he will lie on her rug, drooling.
Emma doesn't heal horses in solitude. Owners have lessons, too. Emma says: 'I can establish trust and respect with the horses, and then you put them back in the same environment and they think, "I don't trust you".' She is angry that the newspapers called Tom 'dangerous' because he nearly killed Rhiannon by throwing her so violently.
He wasn't born like that,' she says. 'It is always people doing people things to horses. Sometimes they are mad when they come out of the lorry. So stressed. So wound up. So pumped up with food and so unhappy with where they are.'
If the horses were smarter, she implies but doesn't say, they would do to us what she did to the Pony Club. They would tell us to take a hike.
'The British are good at looking after their horses the way they think they want to be looked after,' Emma says as she waves me off. 'But perhaps they could look at it through the horses' eyes. What is important to a horse is not important to a human.'
How true, I think, looking at Emma's beautiful stables — the ones her patients would leave if they could for a nice, cold field. Because, unlike us pampered softies, that's where they really want to be.
Thoroughbred breeders are calling for an industry-wide vaccination program to ensure equine flu never breaks out again, after New South Wales was this morning declared free of the disease. 
