13 owners and not one came forward

I've said it. More than once, reading about horses found abandoned or news stories where animals have to be recovered from awful situations. "If I won the lottery, I'd have a sanctuary." It comes out of the helpless feeling, the wanting to do something, anything.

When Anna Louise came back from speaking with Billy Thompson, she was already sold. A day at The Retreat Animal Sanctuary, behind the gates. I didn't need much convincing.

What we found behind those gates was this. In the year before our visit, someone had throttled Billy unconscious. His kidneys bled for three and a half weeks. He'd gone out to help a horse, explained, calmly, that the horse wasn't dangerous. It was terrified. "Don't call me cruel." That was the trigger. It wasn't the first time he'd paid a price for intervening. Billy has been jailed on multiple continents, taken to court more times than he can count. His view on all of it: when you go out to find animals being neglected, you expect to meet the people who neglect them. That's part of the job.

About 80% of the horses at The Retreat have been dumped. Not all because someone was deliberately cruel. Some arrived because the cost of living made keeping a horse impossible, because families fell apart, because the horse passed through so many hands that whoever ended up with it had no real attachment. One arrived with a microchip logging 13 registered owners. Billy contacted every single one. Not one was interested.

And they lose some. A seven-year-old foal the whole team had raised from a starving mother. A nine-year-old with cancer of the hoof, who Billy had promised to get out of pain, and couldn't. "It broke the team," he said. "I'll probably never be able to say her name."

What kind of person sustains this? Billy's answer is that it isn't really a choice. He was bringing stray dogs home at 14, had 11 dogs and five ponies by 16. He spent 16 years feeding 7,500 pigeons in Trafalgar Square every night after Ken Livingstone banned the seed sellers in 2001 — because the alternative was 7,500 pigeons dying. Every time a court told him to stop, he told the judge: "It won't stop me."

Lill is Billy's sister, a trustee who manages much of the day-to-day horse care and has adopted several animals from the sanctuary herself. She commutes to London for work, comes home to horses, dogs, her daughter, elderly parents, her son and his wife. She posts to TikTok from the bath because that's genuinely the only spare time she has. "I'm living the dream," she told Anna Louise. She meant every word.

The romantic idea of sanctuary life is about what animals give you. Billy never saw it as an exchange. When he was six, his father pointed at a toy lorry in his farm set and said it was for taking animals away. Billy told him he was wrong: his lorry was for going to get them. You don't learn to be this way, he told Anna Louise. You're either that way or you're not. He's been that way since he was six years old.

Making this documentary

A day at The Retreat, cameras, an edit suite, and a lot of hours. If you've found value in what we make and want to help us keep making it, here's how: curiousequestrian.co.uk/support or like and subscribe on YouTube, Spotify or Apple. Thank You.