Rick: Well. It's still August 19th. Please state your name.

Jade: Jade Warren. And the name of my horses is Adrianna's Tiger Lily, around the farm we call her Addy.

Rick: And please describe Addy for us.

Jade: She is a 19 year old American Indian horse. A mare. She's 15-2 hands, if she stands perfectly square.

Rick: What's the definition of an Indian Horse?

Jade: The American Indian Horse Registry was started to preserve all of the true American breeds. Any of the first Spanish Conquistadorean style horses qualify for the registry of American Indian horse.

Addy is a paint-pinto cross. But they could be a Tennessee Walker or Spanish Barbes. The original Mustangs paint-pintos. Any cross.

There's a list of maybe 10, which I don't have them all memorized. They will often have her exact markings. She has the white socks, but she also has black points above those. She has what they call permanent eyeliner in the gray around her eyes and her muzzle, the black points on her ears. They almost always have the dorsal stripe and the two layer two-tone mane and tail.

Rick: All right. Please tell us "the story."

Jade: So, Miss Addie. I wasn't really looking for a mare. First of all, I don't usually work with mares. I was taking riding lessons and she was a four year old with some behavioral issues that I just ended up riding. And she gloomed on to me like a little barnacle. And the feeling quickly became mutual. I loved her to death. She was owned by somebody else at the time that I met her. He started losing interest in horses more and more. I started coming more and more. I ended up leasing her. 

They told me that she was for sale and they wanted 5000 dollars for her. And I said, well, I guess I'm going to have to say goodbye. I didn't have 5000 dollars. That was super sad. So I spent as much time as I could with her, cried a lot, expecting to lose her. And then the owner of the barn called me one afternoon and she sounded real mad. 

“What's the matter, Donna?” She said, “Eric just called me,” who was her prior owner, “and said that he sold Adriana. And I said, no, you didn't, unless you sold her to Jade. And I hung up on him. And then I thought, well, crap, now what am I going to do? So I talked with Sam.” Sam is her daughter and they co-owned the barn together. 

Donna said to me, “If you give him a dollar, I will make him sell her to you and I won't sue him for the board that he owes me.” Apparently he hadn't been paying board for several months. 

So that's how I came to own her. We worked a lot together. This mare has actually broken both of my elbows in an event when she spooked and took off and I went one way and she went the other. 

When I bought her, she had small warts patches on her chest and on her shoulder. I had the vet look at her and said they are sarcoids, don’t touch them. Well, they started growing so I decided to touch them. And I selected a bloodroot extract, which is commonly used to treat them. When I started treatment, instead of shrinking, they got bigger and bigger and angrier and bloodier and it was just awful.

Picture a giant bleeding watermelon hanging off of this horse's shoulder. I cried. I cried. I cried. I finally found the University of Liverpool was doing a study on what they call at the time they were calling the malignant tumors because malignant means it will spread to different parts of the body. But sarcoids tumors only spread to skin tissue. They won't invade muscle tissue. They won't invade bone. He was running a study on this new cream and she made it into the program. For five years, every day to every other day, sometimes every third day, I had to put different creams on different tumors in different spots and leave it on for a different amount of time. And it just seemed to be a losing battle. I thought for sure that she was going to pass away. They were getting to the point where they restricted movement of her left leg. She could barely take a full step.

I took her to Tufts. We did a surgery on her armpit region on that left side to try and free it up and see if we could get rid of the tumors. She bounced around to a couple of barns because in the meantime, Sam and her husband got a divorce. The barn closed. And then we ended up here where we are now. 

It was as if somebody flipped a switch. I had done a treatment just before we moved here. And the treatment protocol was, you treat it, you finish the protocol, you wait to see if it heals or if the tumor grows back. If it looks like it heals, you stop touching it. If it looks like the tumor is growing back, he gives you a new protocol. You start again. 

I never did another protocol after I found this property. It was just miraculous, she healed completely. Today, those scars are very important to both of us. They're her life badge. She went through something incredible that neither of us saw. We come out the other end. And to see her now, we're able to show Western dressage. She's got very flat movements. We weren't doing well in the English world. So I'm just blessed to have her and so, so happy to be able to do it. Do this with her today.