Late summer of 2019 I happened to scroll through Facebook at exactly the wrong time, or now I should say, the right time. On an Endurance group I followed, someone posted video of a three year old Arabian stallion at an auction, just purchased by the Kauffman Kill Pen. This little horse looked terrified. He had wide intelligent eyes, a bright white blaze and nose snip. The poster pleaded with the Facebook group for someone to please save him, posting photos of this young, stunning stallion who stood proud even in the scariest of circumstances. There was something about him that made my heart stop and say “no way is this horse going to be slaughtered.”
And so I monitored him. I lived in Washington, the little stallion was in Kauffman, Texas. Not exactly a quick trip to make to check on the little guy, but I stalked the activity on Facebook about him. Would someone local pick him up? Did someone in Texas see the potential I did in this small horse? Days went by, and no one claimed him. How would I feel, I asked myself, if Monday rolled around and still no one had taken him home? I’d be devastated to learn he’d been executed for the crime of someone irresponsibly bringing him into this world and failing to care for him as he deserved.
My heart full and my eyes soaked with tears, I paid the kill pen his ransom and worked on a way to bring him up from Texas to Washington. But there was one tiny, itty bitty little catch. I didn’t have property of my own. I lived in the burbs, in a small three bedroom two bath home at the end of a cul-de-sac. My two horses I already had lived at my parents small five acre place just outside of town. Meaning this new boy would have to go there.
My mother wouldn’t be the issue here, she is as much of an animal lover as I am and helped encourage me to just get the horse, we’ll figure out the rest later. It was my dad who’d be the roadblock.
One evening, after the horse had made it out of the kill pen and was in quarantine with a local gal somewhere in rural Texas, I sat down at my parent’s dinner table and informed my dad, through real tears again, that I had to save this horse and that he was incoming, to be boarded with my mom and by extension, my dad who didn’t really like horses.
Though not thrilled with the choice, my father accepted that the horse was coming, expressed appreciation for my big heart, but said “Just don’t rescue any more horses.”
Well shit. Now I have to.
Three years later in the spring of 2021, after the record-breaking freeze, I bought a 21 acre plot in Texas, because fuck it, I wanted horses and I didn’t want anyone telling me how many horses I could and could not have. My house, my rules. My property, my limits. My land, my life, my choices.
That following summer, after resigning the job I’d bought a house in Texas for, I moved Dante (my first horse), Nisha (my Arabian mare), Ransom (the Kauffman Kill Pen rescue), and my three Shetland Sheepdogs at the time, from Western Washington all the way to my new Texas ranch that I would inhabit, operate, sweat and toil for all by myself.
I named it “Flying Solo Ranch.”
