Cynthia Sweeley Wildfire Ranch Horse Therapy Scam Spring Mills Pennsylvania

This happened a few years ago but after coming across other complaints about this woman I felt compelled to relate my story.

My fiancé has a wonderful 14 year old son (who was 8 at the time) who is autistic.  He suffers from a particularly acute form of echolalia and our doctor suggested pet therapy as treatment.  We have no pets (our landlord doesn’t allow pets) so he suggested hippotherapy.  We looked into it and that’s how we had the misfortune of coming across Wildfire Ranch and Cynthia Sweeley.  We contacted Cynthia.  We asked if she had experience dealing with children with autism.  She assured us she did.  She said she was a certified counselor in traumatic and spiritual therapy and claimed she counseled hundreds of traumatized and special needs families.

We scheduled a session.  When we met her it became painfully obvious that she lied.  When she spoke to our son, she did so in a loud, slow voice (he’s autistic not deaf) and touched him, which every ABA therapist knows NOT to do.  Things didn’t improve when we met the posse.  Her horses were skittish and jumpy.  We finally did get a pinto named Zion to calm down enough for him to brush but he clearly wasn’t comfortable with the horse.  Cynthia insisted that he was just being silly and for us not to project our fear onto him.  When her horse tried to bite him we had enough.  We told her this wasn’t working and that we wanted to leave.  She insisted we pay her $60.00 saying since we weren’t staying for the four hour therapy session she was going to charge us the trail ride price.  For 20 minutes of us grooming her horses with no riding involved whatsoever.  Of course we refused.  Things got out of control from that point.  She claimed her horses where more traumatized by being subjected to our “retard” than he was by them and mimicked how our son reacted to her horses.   My fiancé was enraged when she did this and told her that she was an unlicensed screwball.  Cynthia screamed that she was going to call the cops if we didn’t leave her property right then and called us the worst parents in creation.  As we drove out her driveway, I glanced in my rearview mirror and watched her wave and blow kisses at us. 

When we got home we found a message on our phone from Cynthia letting us know that she planned to sue us for $600.00 she could have made by holding trail rides instead of babysitting our retard.  She also threatened us with a $50,000 lawsuit if we spoke out about what happened.  She was obviously full of hot air.  No action has been taken to this date.  She probably couldn’t find a lawyer unscrupulous like her to take the case.  She’s no kind of a counselor. 

That was 6 years ago and our son is doing much better thanks to a reputable pet therapist.  If anyone is considering pet therapy for their autistic child, I suggest going to ((Redacted)) instead.