THE HORSE wasn’t just skinny, she was skeletal. Not just thirsty, desperate. Alive, but just barely.

When the scrawny filly wandered into Joey Ferris’ yard, he knew exactly where she had come from. Ferris was a lieutenant at the Mingo County Sheriff’s Office, where operators frequently fielded calls about horses like this. In addition to putting out food and water, he decided to use the opportunity to call attention to their ongoing plight.

He began the video he uploaded to YouTube in 2017 with a matter-of-fact assessment: “Bad things are happening in Southern West Virginia.”

“People get a horse,” Ferris says into the camera, eyebrows furrowed, “and they leave the horse on the strip mine.” 

Behind him, the cumin-colored filly bowed toward a pan of water, her ombre tail flicking away dogged summer gnats. It had been a few weeks since this one had appeared on his property, he explained. Her ribs were once again beginning to disappear beneath her flesh, but the horse’s hip bones strained against her hide like a pair of blunt  arrowheads. “We’ve been feeding her really good, but she’s still bony.” 

Ferris posted the video to his YouTube channel and called it Abandoned Horses of WV Need Help. But Ferris was also in need of assistance. The bony brown horse was content to hang out in his backyard for a meal or two, but she bolted at the first sign of a harness. So he forwarded the video to someone who might know what to do. 

If anyone knew that West Virginia’s abandoned horses needed help, it was Tinia Creamer, who had been trying to get people to pay attention to the problem for years—in blog posts, presentations to politicians, and YouTube videos of her own. Creamer runs Heart of Phoenix, a West Virginia horse rescue about two hours north of Ferris’s home in the area known as the Southern Coalfields, where decades of strip-mining – removing mountaintops to access the minerals beneath – have turned the undulating topography into flat, grassy prairies ideal for grazing. The consolation prize: for years, locals took advantage of the newly available  space.  

It was an informal system with implicit rules: Round up your horses in the winter, absolutely no stallions. But when the economy tanked in 2008, many in the region could no longer afford to feed their horses. And so they simply left them—even their stallions—on these sites, hopeful they would survive on the grass that mining companies were legally obligated to plant after operations had shut down. 

Within a decade, thousands of free-roaming horses were scratching out a living on abandoned and active strip mines across nine counties in Eastern Kentucky and four in southern West Virginia, while disagreements over the scope of the problem and how to solve it intensified. Some, like Creamer, maintained the horses were ill-equipped for the elements and needed to be removed. Others argued that all the horses needed was a little supplemental care—a salt block here, a hay bale there—and not only could they endure, they might actually become a point of pride for the region. Something beautiful in a beleaguered place. 

Meanwhile, more horses were turned out. More horses were born. More horses died.   

About a year before Creamer heard from Ferris, her organization responded to a call about another strip mine horse in need. The horse eventually known as Revenant was a deep chestnut with white feet, the front left of which hung uselessly, gruesomely fused in the shape of a hockey stick. His injury was old, perhaps caused by an encounter with a mine shaft or a collision with heavy machinery. Rejected by his herd, the horse had somehow dragged himself across the mountain to find food and water. 

“It is beyond our scope of understanding how he is alive,” Creamer later wrote of Revenant, his body thin and misshapen; it was hardly a question that he be euthanized. 

But when Creamer watched Ferris’s video of the filly who would be named Phoebe, she knew this rescue would go differently. “A starving horse two weeks from death,” Creamer says, but young. “Age was greatly on her side.”

Creamer figured that, like Revenant, Phoebe had also been rejected by her herd. At some point—perhaps weakened by parasites or too dependent on her mother’s milk—she had become a liability. Coyote bait. To drive her away, the other horses kicked her, bit her, or ran her down until the only logical thing for the filly to do was seclude herself. 

But the complex social instinct that told Phoebe to hide also compelled her to seek companions, in this case a miniature pony that belonged to Ferris’s girlfriend. Phoebe was looking for a new herd. 

Visiting Ferris and using that friendly pony as a lure, Creamer enticed Phoebe into a trailer and back to the rescue. A couple weeks after Ferris posted his video, Phoebe was off the mountain for good. 

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