Our Story
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Our Story *
Some places you build. Others, you’re called to.
There is a particular kind of heartbreak that comes from loving horses in a place where so many are quietly suffering. Morika and Nylla Hunter know that heartbreak well. Travelling across Fiji, they kept meeting the same scene: horses tied by the roadside under a burning sun, ribs showing through dull coats, hooves cracked and overgrown, eyes that had long since stopped expecting kindness. Sometimes it was neglect. Sometimes it was worse. More often, there was simply no one who knew how, or had the means, to do better.
It was never just one horse. It was a pattern, hiding in plain sight along roadsides, behind homes and in forgotten paddocks across the islands. And once you truly see something like that, you cannot unsee it. You either look away, or you do something.
They chose to do something.
April 9, 2019: The Beginning
It began small, almost impossibly so: four rescued horses, a modest piece of riverside land in Vakabalea, Navua, and a great deal of faith. What they needed most was someone willing to show up every single day for animals that asked for more patience than most people have, someone unafraid of the size and unpredictability of a hurt and wary horse. The first person they asked said no, afraid. Then Tomu Bulai said yes.
What began as three people and four horses was, in truth, a promise: these lives matter, and we will not look away.
Growing Wild, Growing Whole
Seven years on, that promise has grown into something neither Morika nor Nylla could have fully imagined. More than 40 horses now call the sanctuary home, across 6.5 acres of untamed riverside land where wild grasses meet ancient bamboo and the Navua River slips quietly by. Every horse here carries a story of where they came from, and many still carry the marks of what they survived.
Take Chief, Morika’s heart horse. He arrived so withdrawn and worn down that we believed he was an old horse near the end of his life. He turned out to be under five years old, and today he is one of the gentlest souls on the land. One by one, slowly and patiently, every horse here is becoming whole again.
But healing the horses in front of us was never the whole picture. Across Fiji, so many owners never had the chance to learn proper care or afford the right equipment. Not out of cruelty, but circumstance. So alongside rescue and rehabilitation, we go out into villages to share the basics of humane horse care, and to give preloved, secondhand gear to families doing their best with very little. Rescue is urgent. Prevention is how we make it last.
A Sanctuary in the Truest Sense
What we never expected was how this place would become a sanctuary for people too. Today The Horse Sanctuary Fiji is a home for healing in both directions: a place where horses recover from all they have been through, and where people come to find their own kind of peace.
There is real science behind what happens here. Time with horses has been shown to lower cortisol, the body’s main stress hormone, to slow the heart and bring a deep sense of calm. Horses are extraordinarily perceptive, attuned to the smallest shifts in our body language, tone and emotion. They respond to who you are in the moment, not who you are trying to be, which may be why they so often seem to know what a person needs before a word is said.
For people living with disability, that connection can be especially powerful. The steady, rhythmic movement of a horse gently works the body in ways few other experiences can, supporting balance, coordination, posture and strength. Children with sensory challenges often find calm in the simple routine of brushing a coat. People who find it hard to connect with others can find it easier beside a horse, who never judges, never rushes and asks only for presence. We have watched riders who once needed help simply to sit upright learn to balance and steer on their own, and nothing makes us prouder.
We see the same quiet healing every Saturday. The shoulders that drop. The breath that slows. Visitors arrive carrying things they don’t say out loud, like grief, exhaustion, anxiety, or simply the noise of modern life. And somehow, in the company of these horses, under the bamboo and beside the river, something in them softens.
This land is wild in the way only Fiji can be: lush, alive, humming with its own quiet rhythm. And within it, something rare has taken root. A genuine, unscripted connection between horse and human, between visitor and land, between one soul and another. It cannot be manufactured. It simply happens here, the way it was always meant to.
We didn’t set out to build a sanctuary for people. We set out to save horses. But healing, it turns out, runs both ways. As Morika says, we say we’re rescuing horses, but really, they rescue us right back.
This is The Horse Sanctuary Fiji: a place of rescue and rehabilitation for horses, and a place of healing for everyone who walks through our gate. We hope you’ll come and feel it for yourself.