SANDIWAY, England: A barn owl silently glided through the sky, landing on the trainee falconer’s arm.
“Isn’t she beautiful?” he remarked, his other hand holding on to a crutch. “Owls really are the wonders of the sky.”
Working with owls has helped nature enthusiast Alexander Goodwin, 12, stay positive over the past three years as he has undergone physiotherapy, treatment and surgery for a rare form of childhood bone cancer.
“They were so calm with me that I just felt so safe around them,” Goodwin said at the Cheshire Falconry in Sandiway in northern England, with Willow, a barn owl, on his arm, tilting her head inquisitively.
Goodwin, who lives in central England, was initially misdiagnosed at the age of 8 and was told he would not survive when doctors realised he had cancer a year later.
After chemotherapy, radiotherapy and surgery in the United States to replace his femur with a prosthetic extendable version, Goodwin’s prognosis is better but with a 50-70 per cent chance of the cancer returning up to maturity.
His experience has left him suffering from anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder so he has been receiving “owl therapy” since 2016 through Hack Back, a British social enterprise — a business that seeks to do good.
Goodwin — who has an encyclopaedic knowledge of birds and reeled off owl facts at speed — feels a particular affinity with Willow, 2, who was attacked by a dog when
she was a chick, leaving her with a broken leg.
“She’s an amazing bird and I just feel like we have that connection... she had to recover, just like I did,” he said.
Goodwin, who hopes to open his own bird sanctuary one day, will be taking Willow home in about a month’s time when she is fully trained and an aviary has been built there.
“(Alex) needed to believe in the future, he needed something that would distract him from the gruelling treatment that he had to go through,” said Anita Morris, a psychologist who founded Hack Back seven years ago in the north of England.
Hack Back is one of a handful of social enterprises offering animal-assisted therapy in Britain as part of a wider movement to provide non-medical health and well-being services to communities where public spending often falls short.
— Thomson Reuters Foundation
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