How It All Started
From Suez Taylor, Founder and Executive Director
Equus started as a field of dreams in March of 2020. Simply put, it was a COVID project — to take over the field next door to my house and shelter large animals facing abandonment. I started hosting an outdoor youth program once a week to gather kids struggling with the transition to online education, that was Pony Club. I just hoped to give them a grounding in honest farm work and performance horse training right when the world was forcing them to spend months and years of their childhood on computers.
We used the field and growing herd to imagine a new equestrian facility, in a place where none existed. We studied more advanced care routines and performance riding. And once I had a few good riding horses I started teaching lessons to help pay the costs of better nutrition programs and vet appointments for the animals. New fences, more corrals, etc.
The project took an energetic turn when a long time friend, Meghan Dhaliwal, moved from Mexico City to Cerritos Beach in October of 2021. She was also recovering while still working in journalism at the time. We had met 10 years earlier in Washington DC, both young and just getting started on the international scene. Meg would spend most of that decade working in Mexico on current events and news. I spent time in South East Asian sweatshops, then an ISIS fueled Middle East and radical Europe before I found any beat - for just a moment - in the middle of the United States.
It happened when I got a commission to make a short doc series on inspiring women for a media company I had started with another friend. I linked up with a woman named Winona LaDuke, and it wasn’t long before we were standing on a frontline in the snow of North Dakota at a place called Standing Rock with more than five thousand US veterans staring down active military personnel and President Obama to cancel a multibillion dollar oil pipeline. I realized I really wasn’t a journalist trying to understand the world anymore. I was amidst the spirit realm.
I spent several more years with Winona and she reshaped me, lent me with tools to do some hard personal work. She gave me the guidance that grounded me completely and peacefully in a world terrifyingly close to collapse. I discovered I was pregnant during a medicine lodge in the Apostle islands of Lake Superior, center of the Anishinaabe world, and that’s when the world shifted forever.
When I returned from that ceremony, my partner and I packed up our art loft in Oakland and moved down to Baja sight unseen but heart dialed in. I knew would return to the land come what may, and I needed to learn the desert first. I was working on an important film for Winona, LN3: Seven Teachings in Resistance in 2019, visiting as I could with a new baby, her goddess son. We released the film to much acclaim in activism communities, but COVID shut down nearly all of our screenings. The grants dried up and I returned to the horses completely that next year.
When Meghan moved to Cerritos in 2021 we were just starting to outback the herd across the desert for longer periods. Her first ride was a famously challenging 12 miles down the coast on uncut trails. Later, during her first youth club session we got a call to pull a young wild horse out of a cattle guard North of town (and before ranchers could shoot her) and for some solid length of time that evening Meg was left standing alone with this mare in shock and on the side of a desert highway (missing a joint capsule, ligaments exposed) for more than an hour. Under a dark but starry lit night sky the rest of us raced to gather life-saving medicines, prepare a triage space and a trailer to transport her. Meg took it all in stride and that’s really when the rescue work began in earnest. We became a team.
In fact, the project is made entirely of partnerships. Between a horse and a woman, yes, but between horses and women as well. Isabelle Dahlin joined the herd in early 2022, really an angel from above. I had never met her before the day she told me she had bought the field. I thought all could be lost, we would need to downsize the herd and rent land somewhere far from my home. Then she said to me, ‘I’m about to rescue a horse off the hwy and he needs a place to stay. Do you know of any boarding facilities that will take care of him?’ I simply smiled back and said, ‘I think you just bought one.’
We’ve lived through some real moments with Cabo based veterinarian, Dr. Mauricio Ritchie over the past few years. Deepening our bonds in this frontier land, we lost a three month old wild foal on the sixth joint lávage - a surgical procedure to heal septicemia acquired at birth from the umbilical cord. We were desperately trying to resuscitate, but we had to hang bags of anesthesia from temporary shade structures in a field corral without enough support staff to dedicate a vet tech to the grand task. There’s a higher chance of failure. We lost another wild yearly to a severe and acute colic, multiple impactions in her large intestine made from plastics. After 10 hours of fighting for her life and an expensive surgery, we laid her to rest. We’ve treated tendon infections in wild donkeys, and starvation from abandonment. We do community clinics and youth sessions, teaming up to give horsemen what they need: access to good information on preventative care routines that maintain healthy horses and avoid emergencies.
This year we’re opening a new barn! Isabelle contributed a custom facility to the NorthEast corner of the field to maximize our veterinary work and allow us to expand our teaching capacity. She is the founder of our dedicated non-profit Espíritu de Equus Sur, or Spirit of the Southern Horse. We now host regular clinics and rescue operations; while also offering extensive desert outbacking trips and a fairly full performance training program. We deliver full service field rescue when needed.
At the moment we are partnered with US based non profit All Seated in a Barn (ASIAb) as a fiscal sponsor. We’re serious about funding community wide programs that support the humane treatment of animals. We’re consolidating a board of directors to steer the project and using this moment to elevate our public partnerships. Thank you for being here.
