Episode Details

There's one horse you would cross the country for.

You know the one. The horse who found you when you had the least to give and somehow handed you back to yourself.

Now hold that horse in your mind, and sit with this: roughly 20,000 of them a year get loaded onto trailers bound for Canada and Mexico, and it reaches every kind of horse — the show jumper, the Thoroughbred who ran too slow, the lesson pony grown old, the wild horses rounded up off land that was meant to protect them.

Ashley Avis has looked straight at it. She sewed a button cam into her shirt and walked into the Texas auctions where kill buyers wait. She founded the Wild Beauty Foundation, directed the mustang documentary Wild Beauty: Mustang Spirit of the West, and remade Black Beauty for Disney+. And she has turned all of it toward one aim: passing the SAFE Act in the year of the horse.

This conversation goes to the place most people flinch from. Ashley and I talk about why horse people, of all people, find horse slaughter the hardest thing to watch — and how she makes you look anyway, through ninety-second films voiced by Mackenzie Foy, Jessica Springsteen, and Diane Lane, and scored by Billie Eilish's "What Was I Made For?"

We talk about my mare Lady, one of those wild horses herself, who ran feral for fifteen years before she came to me, and who could have ridden that same truck to Mexico.

We talk about the black colt with pneumonia that Ashley coaxed out of a kill buyer's pasture, and the economics that let a man triple his price on a horse's life.

And we talk about Black Beauty — what Anna Sewell did in 1877 by writing from a horse's point of view, and why it still rearranges the people who meet it.

Then Ashley tells you exactly what two minutes of your day can do. A microsite. Your zip code. A pre-written letter your member of Congress will read.

If you have ever been remade by a single horse, this is the reason to pull the car over.

Ashley Avis is a filmmaker and the founder of the Wild Beauty Foundation. She directed Disney+'s Black Beauty and the mustang documentary Wild Beauty: Mustang Spirit of the West, and her Lost Horses campaign is carrying the SAFE Act toward a vote.

Make the call to Congress to pass the SAFE Act: Call the U.S. Capitol Switchboard to directed to your Senators and Representative: 202-224-3121. Once connected, all you have to say is, "Hi, my name is [NAME] and I am calling from [City/State] to ask that the [Senator/Representative] pass the SAFE Act (H.R. 1661, S. 775) to protect American horses, both domestic and wild, from being exported out of the United States to slaughter. Thank you." Share the Lost Horses PSA: The Lost Horses campaign and legislation to stop horse slaughter is gaining momentum and we must keep up the awareness. Please share the PSA on social media and with your friends and family. Vimeo, YouTube, Instagram,

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