Meet “A.D. Acre Love & Lillies,” who we call Lorelei (also previously nicknamed Bubbles).

Our number 4 horse introduced was our Tennessee Walking Horse, Poison, who has stringhalt, and is a horse that worked his way into our hearts despite us not knowing about his disabilities prior to acquiring him.  He has a forever home with us.  When we acquire horses, if we feel we are up to the challenge, time commitment, and costs, we will occasionally, for the right horse and in the right situation, make a lifelong commitment to a specific horse who only exists on our farm to give us the joy of interacting with them daily.  We’re not so noble as to call ourselves a rescue, but we do recognize things that we are able to do and contribute to keep some horses away from kill buyers at auctions from time to time (and, honestly, we need to stay away from auctions to keep our hearts from overwhelming our logic by taking on more than we can afford to given the constraints we have).  Though, if it’s not something we can handle, we also do not put ourselves in the position of taking on massive burdens that we are ill-equipped to manage.  Most of the time, a lot of deliberate thought goes into these sorts of decisions.  God puts things in front of us, we pray about it, and we meet Him halfway with doing research and due diligence.

Whereas Poison had disabilities discovered during the days after we purchased him, Lorelei is a completely different story altogether.

We have several individuals that we’ve worked with, done business with, and just communicated with that we consider friends in the Gypsy Horse circles.  Webs of trust build in this small community over time (and, likewise, trust broken is hard to recover).

One of those friends reached out to us in the summer of 2022.  She’s way more into larger riding horses, and she was also an active breeder.

She had acquired a horse that was in rough shape when she received her.  She was thin, had poor muscle development, and she also discovered that the mare had a bad hitch in her gait from a wobbling that was centered around her hind legs.  The friend had spent a considerable amount of time, effort, and money with X-rays and testing only to find that blood tests ran showed a high load rate of one of the protozoal infections responsible for EPM in horses.  The vet gave a diagnosis of EPM.  That vet also provided a plan of action to best care for Lorelei.  Further opinions were given after some time that Lorelei was clear to be bred but would never be able to be ridden.  She would also likely never exceed 13.2hh.

As previously stated, our friend enjoyed horses quite a bit taller than 14hh and did not really have a good excuse to hold onto a horse that was not able to be ridden.  She openly and honestly informed us of all of this.  She also let us know that she had to segregate Lorelei into a round pen all by herself for a short time due to other horses picking on her (more on this further down…haha!).  This also meant additional efforts toward caring for a horse separated from all others.

Doing the research ourselves, we felt that this would absolutely be one of those situations that we could manage.  Many folks believe that a diagnosis of EPM is a death sentence.  While that’s true for some horses that have particularly bad cases, it’s not always the case.  Lorelei was in remission.  Some horses that have had EPM never come out of remission.  A percentage do come out of remission with additional ill effects, and some of those cases do end in death (most often by euthanasia).  She might have a shorter overall lifespan, but our prayers, hearts, logic, and research all said that this was something we should do.  If you would like to know more about EPM, we have learned a lot about it, and can let you know what we know.

We purchased Lorelei and immediately scheduled an exam with our vet for after Lorelei’s arrival.

Our vet told us all the same things we were told by our friend post-examination.  She also provided additional scripts for continuing an anti-protozoal program and scheduled a follow-up for later.

At the end of the next leg of her medications and supplements, she had improved some, but our veterinarian declared her “as good as she will ever get.”

During Lorelei’s recovery period, we got to know a little bit about her personality.  She’s a sweetly dispositioned mare for handling purposes, but she eggs other horses on.  She’s an instigator, quite a spitfire, in fact.  And…”good for her!”  She’s got spunk, a strong will to survive, and she even has a little bit of cheeky audacity.  She’s no pushover.  Her being “picked on” in our paddocks was often her having “back and forth” sessions with other specific horses.

We did have a couple of very specific horses that she couldn’t be paddocked with.  She and those specific horses would just go back and forth after each other all day with the most common result being Lorelei slipping on mud, or tripping, and falling.  We’ve even seen her rear on her back two (weak) legs a few times which caused her to fall over on just a few occasions.

She just can’t be in the same space with another horse that is a needler like she is.  She’s currently pastured with 9 other horses, and she gets along just fine with all those horses.  She even respects that there are several horses in the hierarchy above her in the pecking order.

We watch our horses a lot.  Our day jobs have us working from home in home offices that have windows overlooking our horse pastures.  They’re under a lot of surveillance.  That makes it easier to assess, troubleshoot, and resolve issues quickly with certain personality conflicts.

The short of Lorelei’s current story is that she’s now in her forever home.  We are thrilled to provide her with a life with other horses and all that she needs.  She's a beauty with such long hair for a three-year-old (down past her knees).  We watch her for signs of coming out of remission, and she is currently, like the vet said, “as good as she will ever get.”  She will never be ridden or worked much.  She may only ever be bred if we feel like we’ve seen improvement that we feel indicates that it could be a safe possibility.  We don’t believe that to be true at this time, and we don’t care if she ever does anything but live happily out on our green grass.