Bobcat Compact Tractor Preps Customer for Lifesaving Work

Therese Swift puts in plenty of 15-hour workdays. She handles high-pressure jobs and keeps calm in crisis. Many nights she works until daybreak, and still she presses on with her new Bobcat® CT4045 compact tractor when she arrives home.  

But Therese is not a contractor; she’s a mobile crisis clinician. Even so, her machine is just as critical to her professional work — in an unexpected way. Caring for people in a mental health crisis is a demanding assignment. To balance the pressure that comes from those calls, Therese relies on the emotional support she gets from spending time with her horses at home. And recently, she needed to find a new machine to help her care for them. 

Horse Drawn 

According to Therese, she was born wanting horses. They were the subject of all her childhood books and the motivation for her first summer job, which was detasselling corn. By age 14, she had saved enough to buy her first horse. She has had one ever since, including the time away at college.  

These days, Therese owns five horses and five mules several miles southeast of Aledo, Illinois. They are her passion and a source of comfort and strength. Whether her professional work ends at dawn or the middle of the night, she heads right out to her horses.   

Protect the Stable 

Recently, problems with her 1972 tractor from a different manufacturer took away from the relief she found caring for her horses. Constant breakdowns left the tractor stranded in the pen with its bale spear exposed. The idle machine was a threat to the horses’ safety until it was repaired or towed from the pen. Therese realized if she wanted to enjoy the benefits of her horses, she needed a new tractor.