Who Are We

Every one needs their own fairy tale, and that fairy tale exists inside of us from our earliest years of life. 

 

Tara was born out of childhood dreams of an average girl from Wrocław. Scarlett has always had many friends, such as dogs, 

cats, jackdaws or hedgehogs... of course the ones taken from the street - sick, stray, having no use to anyone. She rode horses since she was a kid. She spent a lot of time in splendid stables (like WKS Śląsk), where the stallions were fit, clean and emanating with health. There, she also took care of the horses,  she cleaned them and fed them. She began to participate in competitions, and won medals and various awards. Later on, she graduated from her local University of Physical Education and completed a course in hippotherapy. She married for the first time, gave birth to her first-born Icarus (Pl. Ikar, she chose the name in reference to the mythical Icarus, so that her son was able to dream). She got divorced, and moved to the North of 

Poland, to Pomerania region. There, in one of major cities called Kołobrzeg, she went to a job centre and was offered a job of  

a vet’s assistant. And so she learned to stitch wounds, give injections etc. She travelled from village to village to vaccinate dogs and cats. There she had a really good look at how cruelly people were able to treat animals. She also saw the dark side of their beloved horses‘ lives. Horses that were weary,  exhausted with labour, often crammed in tiny, airless cowsheds filled with dung. She will never forget a household with ten mutts chained together in one place. The owners asked her to put them all to sleep, because “they eat like pigs!” . “How on Earth can people be such monsters?” - she kept asking herself. And then, a German woman, the founder of Pro Animale foundation, came to the scene. She had opened several animal shelters for 

animals throughout Europe, and she came to Poland open one too, this time for horses. Scarlett was one of the first volunteers to help. 

Quote: “And then I realized an even darker image of equine existence. I learned Poland was the largest mass horse exporter 

for slaughter in whole Europe”. 

She saw foals, battered and bleeding, fillies (very often pregnant), stallions, once proud, now with pus seeping from their 

wounds. They were all brought together to sales fairs, loaded by force (often with the use of shouts and violence) to large 

trucks that would take them to remote slaughterhouses. They were all treated like meat, as if they were objects that didn’t feel.

Quote: “It dawned on me that many people only claim to love horses. They admire their beauty and feed them, but as the 

horse gets old and ailing and it no longer can work for people, they simply get rid of it, feeling no attachment any more.  

 

“So where’s the love here?” - Scarlett would ask. And then she figured that she would open up a shelter for sick, old and 

abandoned horses and she would get the money for that purpose no matter what.  

 

It was year 1995. Scarlett’s parents sold 

their property in Pomerania region and handed their daughter a lion’s share of the cash. It was time to make the dream come 

true - she began to build Tara.