On rescuing two paint horses, surviving what came next, and what happens when an animal teaches you to trust yourself again.
There are things you carry from childhood that you don’t fully understand until life circles back to them. For me, it was paint horses.
My grandmother was a barrel racer. I didn’t grow up watching her compete — I grew up on the stories. The way she told it, those paint horses were something else entirely: their bold markings, their power, the way they moved with a kind of knowing confidence. I filed it away the way children file away inherited beauty: somewhere soft and quiet, not yet a dream but not quite forgotten either.
Years later, a close friend named Sara had a horse property. Going there as a kid opened something in me — the smell of hay, the weight of an animal’s attention, the particular stillness that settles over a barn at dusk. I didn’t know what to do with that feeling then. I just held onto it.
Topanga Changed Everything
When I moved to Topanga nearly a decade ago, I knew there were horses nearby. I started going on trail rides — the kind you book with a group, moving single-file through the canyon. It was beautiful, but it wasn’t enough. I found myself wanting something more than a guided experience. I wanted a relationship.
What I didn’t have was any idea how to make that happen.
The answer came, as many things do in Topanga, through community. At a beach cleanup on Topanga State Beach, I met a woman named Rose. She was looking for someone to lease her horse. I told her I wanted to do it — with complete confidence and essentially zero experience.
She invited me to meet her at the barn. It became clear, fairly quickly, that I didn’t quite know how to ride. But Rose was gracious. She let me continue working with her horse and introduced me to one of the trainers there, a woman who would soon become my teacher. She was rooted in natural horsemanship — a philosophy built on communication, trust, and reading an animal rather than controlling one. She taught me to ride bareback first, then with a saddle pad, building a foundation before layering on anything else.
It was during this time that I told her what I’d always wanted: a paint horse of my own.
The Kill Pen Pipeline — What Most People Don’t Know
Through my trainer, I met Ashley, the founder of Wild Beauty Foundation — an organization that works to put horses in homes rather than slaughterhouses, and raises awareness about the federal roundups of wild horses on public lands.
What Ashley introduced me to is a reality that most people outside the horse world have never heard of.
While horse slaughter facilities no longer operate within the United States — the last ones closed in 2007 — American horses are still being trucked across the border for slaughter in Mexico and Canada, where approximately 20,000 were shipped for human consumption in 2024 alone. These are not just neglected or unwanted horses. Horses sent to slaughter are typically ensnared in the pipeline when their owners experience hardship or transition — animals that could be rehomed and live productive lives, but are instead outbid at auction by “kill buyers” contracted by foreign slaughterhouses.
Horses bound for slaughter are commonly and legally shipped for more than 24 hours at a time in crowded trucks without food, water, or rest — and the methods used do not uniformly provide quick or painless deaths. The conditions at Mexican and Canadian plants are extremely poor, with horses documented left to die in pens without assistance, cruel handling, and unacceptable transport conditions.
According to a 2022 ASPCA poll, 83% of Americans oppose slaughtering horses for food — yet the practice continues, sustained by a small network of kill buyers and a lack of federal legislation to stop it. The Save America’s Forgotten Equines (SAFE) Act, which would ban the export of horses for slaughter, has repeatedly stalled in Congress despite bipartisan support.
Ashley’s work sits at the intersection of rescue and advocacy — getting horses out of the kill pen pipeline and into homes where they can be cared for, while fighting for the systemic change that would make her work unnecessary. Part of that work is quietly radical: Wild Beauty partners with young girls across the country — many of them Girl Scouts — who fundraise to help cover the cost of a rescue. In exchange, they earn the right to name the horse. It’s a small exchange with an outsized effect: a nine-year-old in Ohio raising money for a horse she’s never met, who then gets to hand that horse her name and, in some small way, her story.
A Leap That Didn’t Make Sense
Ashley connected me with a paint horse who needed a home. Her name was Soleil. She was six years old.
The first time I saw the video of her, nothing about it was logical. I had leased a horse. I had never owned one. I didn’t have a property built for two, let alone the experience most people would say you need before taking on a rescue with a history I didn’t fully know. Everyone in the horse community I mentioned it to thought I was, quite reasonably, out of my mind.
But watching that video, something in me recognized something in her. It wasn’t a decision I arrived at by weighing pros and cons. It was a pull — the kind you don’t get to explain to people who are asking you to be rational. I said yes anyway.
What I didn’t fully anticipate was that Soleil came with her daughter — a filly named Aurora, only six months old. I hadn’t planned on two horses. I said yes to that, too.
Then, just before they made the long trip from Texas to Topanga, I received a call that stopped me in my tracks: Soleil was pregnant.
I hadn’t known. Nobody had known. I remember feeling shocked, and scared, and — underneath both of those things — strangely certain that this was some kind of initiation. Not a complication. A beginning that was asking something specific of me before it would even start.
(meeting soleil & aurora for the first time. the girls arriving from slughter)
Weaning, Birth, and a Name That Already Existed
The months after Soleil and Aurora arrived became one of the most intense and formative periods of my life.
I had to wean Aurora from her mother to prepare Soleil for the birth of her second baby — a process that is its own kind of heartbreak, asking a baby to separate from her mother before she’s ready, because her mother’s body is asking for something else. I was there for the birth that followed. The filly who arrived felt, immediately, like an answer to a question I hadn’t known I was asking. I named her Kismet, because there was no other name that made sense. I knew, watching her stand for the first time, how meant to be the whole chain of events had been.
Three horses. A mother, her firstborn, and a new life that hadn’t been part of anyone’s plan.
Aurora, in particular, required round-the-clock care in those early months. I fought hard to keep her alive. I learned things I never expected to need to know, made calls I wasn’t sure I was qualified to make, and discovered that the work of saving another living thing has a way of quietly saving you, too.
The Hardest Goodbye
What I didn’t know, when I said yes to that video, was that the hardest part of this story wouldn’t be the birth, or the weaning, or any of the logistics of caring for three horses at once. It would be a goodbye I chose to make ahead of a change I could feel coming.
About two years after Kismet was born, I made the decision to find homes for Aurora and Kismet. I could feel a big life change coming, and I knew, even before I could fully explain it to anyone, that I wasn’t going to be able to keep all three horses through it. Caring for three horses is hard enough in steady circumstances. Caring for three horses while your life is about to be turned upside down is a different thing entirely. I needed to simplify, and it was a decision I made entirely on my own.
That knowledge arrived with a grief that had nothing to do with logistics and everything to do with what it meant: I was about to break a family apart. In the horse community, families staying together is the exception, not the rule — most horses are bought, sold, and separated as a matter of course. Knowing that didn’t make it easier. If anything, it made the decision feel heavier, because I understood exactly what I was choosing to do to them.
I made the decision to keep Soleil and find a home for her two daughters, together, so that at least Aurora and Kismet wouldn’t lose each other. It wasn’t until shortly after that a ten-year relationship of mine ended, too — one loss arriving right on the heels of the other, though I hadn’t rehomed them because of the breakup. If anything, having already made that impossibly hard decision on my own terms, before everything else fell apart, is part of what let Soleil become the anchor she became for me next.
What happened next is the part of this story I still find hard to talk about without getting emotional. The horse community rallied around me. A woman named Mattise — someone who has rescued horses herself and now uses them in her own healing work with people — stepped in and adopted both girls, keeping them together, giving me the one mercy I hadn’t been sure I’d get.
I have come to think of that moment as proof of something I keep relearning: that the same leap that looks reckless from the outside — saying yes to a video, saying yes to a breakup you didn’t choose, saying yes to letting go — tends to be met with a kind of support you couldn’t have engineered on your own. It doesn’t erase the grief. It just tells you that you’re still on the right path.
Why I Kept Soleil
Out of the three, I knew Soleil was the one I couldn’t let go.
She was the mother. She had been through the most — the trauma of the pipeline, a pregnancy no one had planned for, a weaning, a birth, and now a family being split apart around her. Of the three of them, she was also the most misunderstood, the hardest to read, the one people were quickest to underestimate. I couldn’t shake the fear that if I let her go too, she’d end up passed along until she landed back in the same pipeline she’d already survived once. That wasn’t a risk I was willing to take with her.
Keeping Soleil turned out to be one of the best things my heart has ever done for me. I was coming out of a ten-year relationship, and my entire world had shifted underneath me. She became my anchor in the middle of that — the one constant I could return to when almost nothing else was.
I stayed close to her for six months after the breakup before I made the decision to move to Austin, Texas, for a year — to heal, and to take a job at an interior design firm that let me build a different kind of life for a while. Leaving her wasn’t easy, but once again, another angel showed up exactly when I needed one. A friend named Taylor offered to lease Soleil for the year, so she was cared for and loved while I was away figuring out what my life looked like on the other side of everything ending.
When I came back to LA, I moved in with a friend, Kari, whom I’d actually met at the barn where Soleil lived. Not long after, Kari ended up getting a horse property just down the street from that same barn — and she offered to have Soleil move in, too. It was one more example of the kind of support that keeps arriving exactly when it’s needed, unasked for. When Soleil arrived at Kari’s, it felt less like a relocation and more like she’d finally landed where she was always supposed to be.
Jeans I Love to Wear Horseback Riding From Kut From The Kloth
These are sold out but you can get the same style HERE
SHOP MEG HIGH RISE WIDE LEG IN TONE WASH
On My Wish List
The Science of What Horses Do to Us
I felt it long before I understood it — a kind of settling that happened whenever I was in the barn, something that loosened in my chest and slowed my breath. It turns out there is a scientific explanation for that.
Research from the HeartMath Institute offers a physiological window into why horses have such a profound effect on the humans who spend time with them. A magnetometer can measure the human heart’s energy field radiating up to 8 to 10 feet around the body — but the electromagnetic field projected by a horse’s heart is five times larger, creating a sphere-shaped field that completely surrounds you and can directly influence your own heart rhythm.
Horses are naturally predisposed to having a coherent heart rhythm — their nervous systems are often in a state of calm, centered regulation, a state of high wellbeing. When we enter that field, our own nervous systems begin to sync with it. It’s a bidirectional exchange: the horse’s regulated state can pull our dysregulated one toward coherence. Research has linked time spent with horses to lowered blood pressure and heart rate, higher beta-endorphins, decreased stress levels and feelings of anger and hostility, and greater feelings of empowerment, confidence, patience, and self-efficacy.
For those of us who carry chronic stress or nervous system dysregulation — which, at this point in history, is most of us — proximity to a horse is not a luxury. It is medicine.
What They Actually Taught Me
I went into this thinking I was the one doing the rescuing.
Soleil and Aurora had other ideas.
Horses, particularly in natural horsemanship, require you to be honest. They don’t respond to performance or posturing — they respond to what’s actually true about your internal state. You cannot fake calm around a horse. You cannot lead from a place of fear and expect them to trust you. They will reflect back to you exactly what you bring, with a precision that no therapist or mirror can quite match.
What I learned, slowly and sometimes painfully, was how to trust myself. How to make a decision without second-guessing it into the ground — the same instinct that told me to say yes to a video of a horse I’d never met is the instinct that got me through weaning a baby too soon, through a birth I didn’t expect, through a breakup that cost me two-thirds of the family I’d built. How to hold my ground — not from ego, but from a genuine sense of self. These animals, and the strange, difficult year they put me through, taught me a strength and resilience you can only learn from heartbreak and a fire of sorts.
I thought I was saving them. Truthfully, they saved me.
A Note on Wild Beauty Foundation
Ashley’s work through Wild Beauty Foundation continues to pull horses from the pipeline and place them in homes, including through the young fundraisers — Girl Scouts among them — who raise money for a rescue in exchange for the honor of naming a horse they may never meet in person. The organization also builds public awareness around the federal roundup of wild horses — a separate and deeply troubling chapter of American horse welfare that deserves its own conversation.
If you’ve felt called by this story, the most meaningful thing you can do is learn more, adopt, or support the organizations doing this work on the ground. Every horse in the pipeline is someone’s Soleil — waiting for the person who hasn’t found them yet.
How to Help — Resources for Rescue, Advocacy, and Healing
Whether you feel called to adopt, donate, advocate, or simply learn more, there are organizations doing extraordinary work at every level of this cause.
Wild Beauty Foundation — wildbeautyfoundation.org Founded by filmmaker Ashley Avis, WBF is a 501(c)3 nonprofit dedicated to protecting wild horses, wolves, and wildlife through film, education, rescue, and advocacy. Their critically acclaimed documentary Wild Beauty: Mustang Spirit of the West brought national attention to the federal roundup crisis, and their boots-on-the-ground rescue efforts have helped place horses from the slaughter pipeline into forever homes. Follow their #IStandWithWildHorses campaign and support their ongoing work to pass the SAFE Act and the Wild Horse and Burro Protection Act.
Return to Freedom Wild Horse Sanctuary — returntofreedom.org Based in Lompoc, California, Return to Freedom provides permanent sanctuary to nearly 400 wild horses and burros, keeping them in their original family bands and natural social groups. They offer educational tours, volunteer weekends, photo safaris, and sponsorship programs.
American Wild Horse Campaign — americanwildhorsecampaign.org One of the leading advocacy organizations fighting to end the federal helicopter roundups of wild mustangs on public lands. They work on policy reform, legal challenges, and public education to protect herds in their natural habitat.
ASPCA Horse Rescue & Slaughter Prevention — aspca.org/slaughter The ASPCA has been at the forefront of pushing for federal legislation to end horse slaughter and the export of horses for slaughter abroad. Their site offers resources for taking action, supporting the SAFE Act, and connecting with horse welfare programs nationwide.
My Right Horse — myrighthorse.org A free, searchable database of hundreds of adoptable horses across the country — an ideal starting point if you’re considering bringing a horse into your life.
For Healing Through Horses:
EAGALA (Equine Assisted Growth and Learning Association) — eagala.org The world’s largest and most established professional organization for equine-assisted psychotherapy. Their model pairs licensed mental health professionals with equine specialists to offer ground-based therapy — no riding required — for trauma, PTSD, anxiety, depression, addiction, and more.
PATH International (Professional Association of Therapeutic Horsemanship) — pathintl.org PATH certifies therapeutic riding instructors and equine-assisted services programs across North America.
Every horse in the pipeline is someone’s Soleil — waiting for the person who hasn’t found them yet.
