Every day, a 1,000-pound quarter horse strolled through the green acres of a Wisconsin farm with a girl sitting on his back.
The horse was named Power, and 8-year-old Niki Marie Hansen would pet his brown mane, saddle him up and lay her head on his hindquarters, before the pair rode off on another adventure. Power was a surprise gift for her eighth birthday. To this day, Hansen calls his arrival one of the greatest moments of her life.
“When I saw that trailer come down the driveway,” Hansen tells 225 in the cover story of current issue. “I just lost my mind. I don’t know if there has been a moment that’s ever topped that. Man, I loved that horse. He was my best friend.”
She was 12 when Power came up lame, a common veterinary problem in which a horse develops a mild to severe loss in its ability to move normally.
Equine lameness ranges from a subtle change in gait to the horse being unable to carry any weight on the affected limb. Lameness can be the result of leg breaks and soft tissue injuries such as mildly to severely torn tendons and chipped bones. Lameness is also one of the most common reasons horses must euthanized because of the many complications involved with treatment and the great diminishment in their quality of life.
After being told her beloved horse would likely need to be put down, Hansen was inconsolable. She began questioning everything. “I wondered, ‘Why can’t he have a fake leg like people do?’” Hansen says. “‘Why does he have to die?’”
Power survived after risky surgery, but the experience started a fire in Hansen that would follow her for years.
After first attending college and earning a degree in music, Hansen was still searching for a greater purpose. She was shuffling through jobs and struggling. Eventually, she wound up homeless, sleeping in her car and on friends’ couches for almost two months until she could find an apartment that accepted both her and the dog she had at the time.
“I was pleading with God to let me have some sort of meaning in my life,” Hansen says.
She thought back to Power and the questions she asked as a child. A friend of hers had recently forwarded her an article about a pony named Molly who had a prosthetic leg. Hansen was inspired. She had finally figured out what she wanted to do: become a veterinary prosthetist.
Hansen, now 37, has done just that. She’s been studying at the LSU School of Veterinary Medicine since 2009, currently finishing her doctoral degree. She earned her certification in human prosthetics at the Prosthetics and Orthotics Center at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago in 2012, the same year she crafted her first successful prosthetic leg for a friend’s goat named Padmé.
