How did you end up in Joshua Tree— or what came first, your decision to start rescuing and rehabilitating horses or moving? Or did those things happen in concert?
We had owned a house in Joshua Tree for a while and one day decided we couldn’t live in a city anymore, this was in 2018! We wanted space, we wanted to be away from toxic fumes and noise, we just wanted to reconnect with nature and feel free. We made the decision and two weeks later were living in our home in Joshua Tree.
You have had a deep kinship with horses for most of your life, how did you make the leap from simply being a lover of horses to liberating and saving horses from slaughter?
It all started when my husband and I were driving by a breeding farm one day and were horrified by the things we saw. We were led to a horse that they were getting “rid of” and the minute we looked in his eyes we knew we couldn’t leave him. We started learning about the abuse and horrible painful life of racehorses and then did a deep dive into the slaughter industry. We had the land and saw that this could be a place they could come to and heal, be reconnected to their natural world and essentially, on a small scale, rewild them. I feel so deeply we owe horses so much for where we are in the world, like, humans literally wouldn’t have been able to survive without them. The way in which they are treated breaks my heart.