In 1985, long-time horse owner and lover Dixie Neeley and her friend Roxanne Anderson rescued three foals whose mothers were sent to auction and bought by a woman who was using them as embryo recipients. She was going to ‘dispose’ of the foals. Dixie and Roxanne kept the foals, ultimately adopting one out and keeping one each.

In the intervening years, although Dixie didn’t do any further rescues, she and Roxanne embarked on a campaign to fight horse slaughter and close horse slaughterhouses in the U.S. Between 1995 and 2003, when Dixie became more active in the campaign to end horse slaughter, close to 650,000 horses were slaughtered in the United States. From 2003 to 2007 (when the last of the horse slaughterhouses in the U.S. were closed), another 300,000 horses went to slaughter in the U.S., while approximately 235,000 were shipped overseas or into Canada and Mexico to be slaughtered.

Then, in 2003, her most beloved horse, BJ (registered name Triple Me Mac), became seriously ill. Over the course of the next year, she cared for him until he finally passed away in 2004. The process of caring for a horse that most people would have put down sparked a passion in her to save other horses whose lives were in jeopardy. In the next several years, Dixie campaigned vigorously to end the use of mares for production of the drug Premarin, both through public affairs means and through rescue efforts. Dixie and some of her like-minded, horse-loving friends brought several of these Premarin mares to San Antonio and adopted them out to loving homes. All of this was done on her own, without the aid of an organization to assist her with the expenses associated with the rescues, including transportation, medical care, food and more. Many of these mares came pregnant or with foals, which increased the expense of rescuing them. In some cases, Dixie rescued only the foals since they were going to be euthanized. She still has some of these horses, while some were adopted out.

In 2005, Dixie also became involved in the rescue of American Mustangs when she rescued two mustangs from the Bureau of Land Management. They had been up for adoption too many times without being taken and were now slated for slaughter.

In about 2007, via the internet, Dixie met Shirley, a woman based in California who rescues horses from a feedlot in Nevada. Shirley told her how the horses are fattened up at the feedlot then sold to slaughterhouses. Dixie took a huge leap of faith and agreed to adopt three mares, sharing them with a horse rescue friend in Marble Falls. This effort opened up Dixie’s rescue efforts to a new area, and in the course of working with Shirley, Dixie also met and has become friends with Jill Curtis, the wife of actor Tony Curtis, who runs Shiloh, a horse rescue in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Over the years, Dixie continued to expanded her rescue efforts to include the US and Canada, from feedlots to slaughterhouses to auctions. In 2009, because her rescue efforts had grown to the point that supporting them with her private funds had become a burden, Dixie formed Triple Me Mac Equine Sanctuary. TMMES is a registered 501(c)3 charitable organization with a six-member Board of Directors, all of whom are horse owners who are committed to the protection and welfare of horses.

TMMES has the ongoing goal of rescuing as many horses as possible, whether directly through its own facility or by its association with other reputable and dedicated rescue organizations. TMMES primarily serves the South Texas area, including Comal, Bexar, Kendall, Blanco and Guadalupe Counties; however, thanks to the organization’s extensive network of equine rescue contacts, TMMES’s rescue efforts have national reach.