HEBER CITY, Utah — At the Liberty Sanctuary in Heber City, founder Debra West and volunteers work at a different pace — the horses' pace.
"Being around horses slows us down a little bit," West said from the sanctuary. "We like to say with horsemanship, fast is slow, slow is fast. If you try to race around a horse, you realize it's a fool's errand, and it's much better to work on their time table and time frame."
West's sanctuary is now home to 30 horses rescued from kill pens. "Not one of those horses is a mean horse," West said. "They come and they're terrified from the treatment humans have given them."
However, thousands of horses across the country never make it to safety like those at Liberty Sanctuary.
"20,000 horses a year from thoroughbreds off the track who didn't run fast enough, show jumpers where their child might have outgrown them. Lesson ponies who got too old. All of these types of horses are being shipped across our borders to Mexico and Canada for slaughter," said Ashley Avis, filmmaker and founder of The Wild Beauty Foundation.
While no federally inspected horse slaughterhouses currently operate in the U.S., there isn't a nationwide ban on exporting live horses to be slaughtered for meat. "Some people think the horses going to slaughter are old or need to be euthanized, and that's just patently false. These are horses with second chapters," Avis said.
Avis, best known for Disney's Black Beauty, launched the Lost Horses Campaign through her nonprofit, The Wild Beauty Foundation. The campaign includes a new PSA and a nationwide push to pass the SAFE Act, which would ban horse slaughter for human consumption in the U.S. and stop exports for that purpose.
More information is available at LostHorses.org. West says a portion of the proceeds collected during a fine art photography gallery show on Friday, Feb. 20, at 6:30 p.m. in Heber City will go toward Liberty Sanctuary.
West hopes to see those horses saved, living out their days on farms like hers. "These horses that are really second to the American Eagle represent American freedom and the west and they're in jail," West said.
