23Jul

Save Tower Hill Stables Animal Sanctuary

The following message was shared on the Tower Hill Stables Animal Sanctuary Facebook page:

It is with much sadness and regret that I must advise that we have hit the end of the road.

Fiona’s mission to rescue as many animals as possible and to promote the cruelty free lifestyle in her unique and awe inspiring way of the past 25 years looks like it is over.

We are so grateful to all our supporters who have helped us with the feed bills over the years, but tragically the level of support is simply not enough for us to continue on. Despite Fiona’s incredible athletic achievements gained in the face of chronic disability, she remains relatively unknown/supported within the vegan community and virtually unknown in the wider community – the UK’s most accomplished athlete that no-one has ever heard of.

We had hoped that her film, Running for Good, would reach a wide audience, but despite our & the producers best efforts this has not happened – frustratingly everyone who has seen it has been blown away by Fiona’s accomplishments and many of those have gone on to donate to the sanctuary, but again the numbers are painfully low and not just enough to make the difference we needed to make the animal sanctuary work.

We had hoped that as promised during filming, Fiona’s inclusion in the Game Changers movie would bring her name and work to the 10m+ audience that will see this film and that this would save the sanctuary, but having been edited out from the final cut, this now will not happen leaving poor Fiona to reside in relative obscurity.

The running costs of the farm site have escalated beyond our initial expectations as the amount of work required to turn it into the sanctuary for animals that we wanted it to be is colossal – we thought we had completed the fencing having fenced what was absolutely necessary, we had hoped that the original fencing in some of the fields combined with dense natural hedging would be enough to keep the animals in, but the cattle have tested the fencing in several places resulting in them getting out a few days ago – net result is that we have to spend around a further £19k on 1000m of additional fencing – Funds we simply do not have.

We are behind some £20k on feed bills & as we head towards the end of the summer, we have done the math & we just can’t carry on.

We have 350 loyal supporters to whom we are very grateful & we have personally put everything we have into keeping going these past few years, but we have nothing left to put in.

In the meantime we will clearly keep caring for the animals in our care, but if we can’t find additional supporters and raise significant funding in the next few days, then it’s over.