\nBartolomeo Cavina.
Credit: Bartolomeo Cavina<\/i><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
However, in case of emergencies, Bartolomeo shares that there is one item that he and fellow volunteers would use to stay safe while out on the savannah.<\/p>\n
“It’s going to sound silly, I know, but it is the reality,” he says before laughing. “Just a stick,” he says.<\/p>\n
“We were training them to be respectful of humans,” he tells PEOPLE.<\/p>\n
Cavina says a light tap on the nose while working with lion cubs would suffice when things started to go south. He also explains that using sticks often created the illusion that the volunteers were quite tall, which would frighten lions acting out of hand.<\/p>\n
“It wasn’t even needed, to be honest,” he adds.<\/p>\n
Online, Cavina boasts over 50,000 followers for his videos, where he often depicts a day in the life working with elite racehorses and other athletic breeds as a veterinary physiotherapist.<\/p>\n
“I’m the equivalent of the human physio, but for horses and dogs,” he says, describing his work. Though he works mostly with horses now, he occasionally works with other mammals, including dogs.<\/p>\n
“Because I’m pursuing more career with top athletes, top athletes means good competitions. There aren’t any in the canine world,” he explains. “It’s more for equines, equestrians mostly.”<\/p>\n
While working with horses, Cavina says his main goal is to “fix the horse to make him perform better.”<\/p>\n
He starts by asking what might be stopping the horse from performing well.<\/p>\n
“It can be sometimes the saddle, it can be a muscular problem that he had in the back caused by the saddle or either or a strain or a little injury that they got,” he says.<\/p>\n
“I basically try to make the horse more comfortable with his body as possible and try to find the cause of it,” he says, adding that he treats the horses “manually” with soft tissue techniques and custom rehabilitation schedules.<\/p>\n
“Every horse is different,” he adds, breaking down how he approaches treating each different horse. “You never know if one protocol is going to work or another one is going to work. So you just figure out the path that you have to follow with them, but it’s 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