Page 37 - Speedhorse May 2019

Jessie with her first barrel horse, Shortys Image, on which she competed on the UW-River Falls College Rodeo Team.
EVOLVING PASSION
Unlike many horse professionals who grew up
in the industry, Jessie has forged her way as the only equine enthusiast in her family. Born in the Milwaukee area, she got involved in 4-H, then attended the University of Wisconsin at River Falls the inaugural year of the nation’s first equine sciences program there.
After competing on the UW-River Falls rodeo team in the mid-1970s, she earned degrees in equine sciences and business marketing. In the years since, Jessie has remained closely aligned with her educational areas of concentration.
After a short stint training horses on a South Dakota ranch after graduation, she moved to Great Falls, Montana, around 1976, where
she trained Quarter Horses and managed broodmares. But, she says, “You can’t eat the scenery,” so around 1980 she moved to the Puget Sound area of Washington state.
“I was fortunate and blessed enough to be there when the horse industry exploded,” she says. “The area was ranked fourth or fifth in the U.S. for horses per capita. It was a fabulous environment; you could ride and compete in every discipline available without traveling far.
“There were lots of opportunities, not only for breeding and training, but for ancillary industries — equine nutrition, veterinary medicine, farrier work, trailer and truck sales — it was a heyday!” she adds.
While there — serendipitously near the now-defunct Longacres racetrack in Renton southeast of Seattle and later at Emerald Downs in Auburn — she operated a Quarter Horse and Paint breeding and training facility where she also trained show horses and coached youths
and adult amateurs, and provided layups for racehorses. That expanded into offering racehorse rehabilitation, retraining and rehoming. “It was a very, very rewarding experience,” she says.
NETWORKING PERSONIFIED
While Jessie ran her horse facility, she also did quite a bit of marketing consulting in the equine industry. “I’ve never been someone who does only one thing at a time,” she says. “Life is way too short!”
In the early ’80s, she worked on charter membership development for the Washington State Horse Council, which initiated the horse negligence law that other states subsequently adopted to limit liability for injury while engaging in equine activities.
She also worked with the Washington State Thoroughbred Breeders Association and organized the International Imported Falabella Miniature Horse Auction.
And, she worked as an equine nutrition consultant for Purina Animal Nutrition for several years. “We set up distribution for Purina’s horse feeds in Washington and Oregon, and that gave me the opportunity to work closely with veterinarians and some of the Thoroughbred breeders in the area on their nutrition programs,” she says.
She worked diligently to bring together people from the research and the experience aspects of the industry. “I was able to bring Purina’s commercial-sector clients to its research farm in Grays Summit, Missouri, where both veterinarians and horse owners could increase their understanding of horse physiology and the impact of good nutrition,” she adds.
During that time, she also organized an annual continuing education program for
equine veterinarians in Washington state. “They didn’t have to pay anything,”
she says, “— just cover their clinics and their hotel and get there, to
Emerald Downs. I’d have five different speakers representing the various equine pharmaceutical companies — not employees of the company, necessarily, but heavy hitters in the industry.” For example, Dr. Rob Holland, a world-renowned equine infectious disease specialist who built horse vaccines for one company, came to talk about when and how to use a particular vaccine, its benefits, and how it reacted with the horse’s physiology.
“We had speakers on various topics from parasitology to orthopedics and so on,” Jessie adds. ”The veterinarians could ask questions and interact, plus get their required CE credits. I loved being able to provide that level of education for these veterinarians who are out in the field every single day doing everything they can to help the horse, from racehorses
to backyard recreational horses — to help
the veterinarians keep up to date and develop relationships with people they wouldn’t otherwise have the opportunity to interact with.”
Her passion for facilitating education branched out into contributing a monthly wellness column for Northwest Horse Source magazine. “My passion for wellness is comprehensive in terms
of nutrition, veterinary medicine, farrier work, training — anything to do with horses has to do with wellness,” she says.
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Jessie operated a Quarter Horse and Paint breeding and training facility in Seattle, which expanded to offering racehorse rehabilitation, retraining and rehoming. She is pictured here with her first rehabilitation project horse in the early 1980’s.