Hollywood Stuntman Risks Life Saving 300 Horses from California Wildfires
Ardeshir Radpour has loved horses for some time. He’s competed in Polo since his college days, and most of his life since then has revolved around equines in one way or another.
He has a lot of experience in entertainment as well, with his bio stating that he is a “Professional Polo Player,” “Trained in Classical Dressage,” familiar with bareback, Western, English and cavalry riding and works with horses on the daily.
Along with his horsemanship skills, he has an impressive array of training in weapons, both ancient and modern. Suffice it to say, he knows what he’s about.
His interest in horses doesn’t only extend to his own or his clients’, though — he deeply cares about horses as a whole, which is evident in the fact that he routinely helps evacuate horses threatened by California fires.
With this last most recent Woolsey Fire, the number of horses he’s rescued is now in the hundreds, with nearly 300 alone rescued in a previous major operation he was involved with.
He told NowThis about how a friend called him, startling him out of his relaxing evening and getting him on the road to help save more horses.
“‘Grab your truck and trailer, come and help us out,'” Radpour said, recalling what his friend had told him. So he got to work.
He experienced quite a bit of frustration while trying to get to endangered horses, and told The Hollywood Reporter how he only managed to rescue a handful before their routes were closed down.
“You’d get a message from someone who needed horses rescued and then you’d hear nothing for hours,” Radpour explained.
“Either they were out of range, or the towers were down, or who knows. This one was a really helpless situation.”
“People were calling and there was just no way for me to get there.” He was finally able to reach some horses, but the sheriffs told them to move out.
“I remember turning my head, looking to the horizon and I was like, that’s a massive red skyline. We need to go now. So we loaded the horses up real fast, got a load out, got a second load, and that fire was engulfing everything.”
“The horses don’t have a voice for themselves,” Radpour told The Dodo. “They live in our world. They live in our rules. So we’re obligated to them.”
“A lot of people say that people are doing heroic things. I don’t think this is heroic. And I don’t think anybody who’s doing it thinks it’s heroic. It’s just what we need to do as human beings to help each other out.”
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