How do I desensitize a therapeutic riding horse to wheelchairs, walkers, and other mobility aids?

Desensitizing a therapeutic riding horse to wheelchairs, walkers, crutches, and other mobility aids is one of the most specific and most essential preparation tasks for this type of work, because these devices are present at every session and their movement near the horse is unpredictable in ways that differ from typical stable environment stimuli. The desensitization process follows the same principles as any systematic desensitization — beginning with the stimulus at a distance or intensity that produces mild interest rather than alarm, allowing the horse to investigate and process at its own pace, and incrementally increasing the proximity and activity level of the stimulus only after the horse has fully relaxed at each previous stage. A wheelchair can be introduced stationary at a distance, then moved slowly, then moved faster, then moved close to the horse, then positioned at the mounting area, before the horse is ever asked to work near participants using it. The sounds of mobility aids are often as alarming as their visual appearance, and introducing the sounds specifically — the clatter of a walker on concrete, the squeak of wheelchair wheels, the click of crutch tips — through recordings or through actual devices in the horse's environment before those sounds are associated with a mounted session allows the horse to process the auditory novelty separately from the visual and spatial novelty of the device in motion. A horse that stands completely relaxed while a wheelchair is maneuvered around it, near its feet, and positioned at the mounting area has been prepared for the mobility aid environment that therapeutic riding requires.