'They deserve this': Southern Utah animal sanctuary hoping to move to forever home

DIAMOND VALLEY, Washington County — Emily Potter is a city girl, yet for the past five years, she has been running a farm animal rescue out of southern Utah, caring for nearly 30 animals, including five cows.

"I didn't grow up with cows, but they need to be taken care of," she said. "It's human nature to care when things are good and when things aren't good."

When Potter says "not good," she is referring to "heartache within the dairy industry."

"Just being a mother myself, when I learned about what happens to cows, I couldn't believe that babies are taken from their moms and we're using their milk for our own purposes," she said. "(Cows) are constantly getting their babies taken away from them and they have, I think, one of the saddest existences because they're just used for their body and then at the end of the day, they also get slaughtered.

"That lit something up in me," she added.

Around that time, Potter herself was facing the possible loss of her own mother from ovarian cancer. To cope with that, she started her own clothing brand called Salty.

"For some weird reason, the only way I knew how to express myself and also show my constant love and support for my mom was to create something," she wrote in an online post. "That something was a sweatshirt, with the word 'Salty' on it. I showed up to my mom's first round of chemo wearing my sweatshirt."

Wearing the shirt with the word "Salty" on it gave her strength.

"'Salty' means that I am extremely bitter, angry and resentful toward her cancer," she wrote in that same post. "But it also means you are tough and aggressive — which my mother definitely is!"

When Potter began rescuing calves, she said she took that same "salty" approach by calling her farm sanctuary The Salty Sanctuary.

Her anger, however, has never been directed toward shutting down farms, she said. Instead, she decided to focus on what she could control, which was caring for calves who might otherwise be discarded.

"It's really easy to get angry about all of this because it's all unfair," she said. "The animals don't have a choice, and it's really hard for me. But I found a dairy farmer here in Utah who gave me some girls (baby calves) that were sick. I have rescued five of them, and they were just days old and were all sick with pneumonia, and I bottle-fed all of them."

Rescuing the cows was one thing, but having a place to keep them was another — which is what Potter said she's struggled with the most.

"We started the rescue down here in St. George, and then we had to move properties," she said. "We've been leasing this whole time."

Additionally, Potter has commuted from her home in St. George to care for the animals on the leased land in Diamond Valley, which is in northern Washington County. The sanctuary is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that, in addition to cows, has horses, a mini mule, a llama, some goats, a sheep, nine chickens, and recently rescued a Texas longhorn.

"Every penny that we get, I just have to be so careful with and I make sure they have food and the supplements and the vetting that they need when they need it," she said. "And so when the rent raises, it's terrifying and it's not sustainable."

The rent for the land was recently raised, and Potter said she's been in the market for a permanent spot. She said she found a place in northern Utah — but with a "hefty price tag."

"It comes with the price of $1 million," she said. "I'm trying not to be scared of it."

Potter has been raising funds through Venmo (@thesaltysanctuary)* to assist in caring for the animals and now hopes to raise money toward purchasing the farm.

"I have to do it for the animals because truthfully, they deserve it," she said. "They deserve better and more loved than I can give them with our situation now, where I'm traveling to take care of them. When it gets cold and rainy like it is today, I want to be able to go out and put a blanket over my cute senior horse. I need this to happen because I don't know where they will go if it doesn't."

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