Bartolomeo Cavina<\/a> has never found himself very far from an animal.<\/p>\nBorn and raised in the Italian countryside, dogs, cats and even wild horses constantly surrounded him and his family as he grew up, and Cavina knew that he wanted to keep that with him as he moved into his adult years. So, following high school, he set out in pursuit of some sort of veterinary career.<\/p>\n
In Italy, Cavina tells PEOPLE, the process by which applicants enter into veterinary school involves a national test, which has a very low pass rate. Cavina found out about the exam’s difficulty the hard way, when he failed the test twice. As a result, he found himself having a sort of crisis \u2014\u00a0about what he should do for the rest of his life.<\/p>\n
Naturally, he did what anyone in crisis would, and decided to pick up his life and move to Zimbabwe, and it was there that Cavina took his love for animals to the next level, working directly alongside lions, elephants and horses.<\/p>\n
“I was obsessed with felines,” Cavina admits, of his time in the southern African country, where he worked on staff as a volunteer at a private national park. While there, he also helped manage a stable that worked with horses on show jumping, polocrosse and, of course, horseback riding safaris.<\/p>\n\n\nBartolomeo Cavina and a lion.
“You could feel the vibration while we were with them, because you were around animals that, if they wanted to \u2014” Cavina tells PEOPLE of working with the lions, miming a dramatic cut across his throat.<\/p>\n
The goal of the national park, he explains, was to help reintroduce numbers of lions into other national parks around Africa. Though he was mostly in the stables spending time with his equine friends, a typical “lion day” consisted of an early morning wake-up, in order to “walk” the lions around the park for a few hours, usually between 6 a.m. and 8 a.m.<\/p>\n
“We were bringing the lions around the areas where they were enclosed or for smelling the air, letting them hunt a little, doing a lot of… They used to call it behavioral enrichment,” Cavina explains. There, the lions would get a better feel for what it was like to be out in the wild and would learn how to hunt, as well as be respectful of humans, he shares. After the first walk, the lions would be fed, and sometimes Cavina and fellow volunteers would clean their enclosures.<\/p>\n\n\nBartolomeo Cavina.
“It’s like if you bring your dog to the park \u2014\u00a0we were bringing lions into the savannah \u2014\u00a0it’s same kind of preparation,”<\/p>\n
Despite working with apex predators daily, Cavina says, he doesn’t have that fear that he finds is common between big animals and people. “That’s the problem,” he laughs.<\/p>\n
However, despite his fearlessness, Cavina admits that there is one type of animal that he won’t mess around with: “I’m never scared of animals except for the reptiles,” he shares.<\/p>\n\n\nBartolomeo Cavina.
“Those ones bug me off because you never know what the hell they’re thinking of doing,” he adds. “You cannot read the expression of the face or the body language, like you can with mammals.”<\/p>\n
Despite his love for the lions, Cavina’s fearless nature meant that, eventually, the novelty of walking alongside lions every day and the stimulation they provided soon began to fade.<\/p>\n
“It was beautiful, but it was repetitive,” he says. “The routine was getting the same.”<\/p>\n
While working with the horses, Cavina describes every morning as “unbelievable.” He recalls mornings where the sun would rise in an almost perfect, picturesque recreation of the iconic opening scene from The Lion King. <\/em>The passion it instilled in him was indescribable. As he worked with other volunteers on the preserve, he began to learn about another way he could pursue his veterinary path.<\/p>\nHe moved to the United Kingdom, where he completed a total of six years of intensive professional training, earning a master’s in veterinary physiotherapy in addition to studying animal osteopathy. He moved to France, where he says he got to know horses better.<\/p>\n
“The French are amazing with horses, amazing. So I got a really, really good extra experience with the horses and young horses as well,” he says.<\/p>\n\n<\/div>
\nBartolomeo Cavina.
“And then I got horribly stuck with horses ever since.”<\/p>\n
Now, Cavina works with athletes \u2014\u00a0equine athletes that is \u2014\u00a0so, high-performance show jumpers and racetrack horses across the world.<\/p>\n
He posts on social media too now, after his friends and family encouraged him to use it in order to help amplify his services. Bartolomeo Cavino:<\/p>\n
“I was like, ‘But I don’t like to show off what I do,'” he recalls telling them before getting on social media, before eventually saying, “Okay, just let me post this one and see what’s going to happen.”<\/p>\n
“It was an explosion, a huge boom.<\/p>\n
Now, partly as a result, he works with horses worth millions of dollars, including the first and second place winners of the 2026 Pegasus World Cup Invitational Stakes \u2014\u00a0a premier Thoroughbred horse race \u2014 Skippylongstocking and White Abarrio.<\/p>\n
“I’m freelance, so I don’t have an office or my [own] place. So I go on a call,” he explains.<\/p>\n
“I’m the equivalent of a human physio, but for horses and dogs,” he then adds.<\/p>\n\n\nBartolomeo Cavina rides horses in Zimbabwe.
“I look at the horse, not just the physique,” he explains of how he works with the animals. “I need to fix the horse to make him perform better. So, I ask, ‘Why does he not perform better? What’s stopping him?’ It can be sometimes the saddle, it can be a muscular problem that he had in the back caused by the saddle, but either or a strain or a little injury that they got. Or some compensatory action due to an imbalance that they had for years. And then it got chronic and then you need to break it down to make it go back to its normal physique and symmetry. So I basically try to make the horse more comfortable with his body as possible and try to find the cause of it.”<\/p>\n
Cavina says, now, more than ever, he has learned to speak the language that the horses do.<\/p>\n
“You have to in this job,” he insists.<\/p>\n
“In a normal job, you follow protocol. Here, you have a kind of protocol, but you have to adjust it every single time differently for what you see in front of you. Because every horse is different. So you never know if this protocol is going to work or another one is going to work. So you just figure out what’s the path that you have to follow with them, but not exactly step A, step B, step C. It doesn’t work like that.”<\/p>\n
Read the original article on People<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n