Horse Power

The U's new Equine Center offers nothing but the best to horses and those who love them

By Patricia Kelly

On a blustery afternoon at the new University of Minnesota Equine Center, a glossy black horse stands in the loading area—refusing to enter his trailer. He tosses his head as if to say: “You go ahead. I’m staying here!”

“One of the owners recently said his horse was ‘downgrading’ when he went back to his stall at home,” says center director Stephanie Valberg with a laugh. “Coming here is like staying at the Hilton.”

UMEC is a $14 million program that University President Robert Bruininks says is “strictly aligned” with the University’s goal of becoming one of the top three public research universities in the world. It focuses on equine sports and reproductive medicine, research, education for veterinarians and students, workshops for horse owners, and outreach to therapeutic riding programs such as We Can Ride, which serves people with physical, emotional, and cognitive disabilities.

For Valberg, a world-renowned expert in equine muscle disorders, UMEC is a dream come true. Last year its predecessor, the Equine Clinic, treated more than 3,000 horses. But the facility left much to be desired. “It was designed for cattle and adapted for horses,” says Valberg. “We’d be trotting a horse up and down the aisle, trying to judge its gait as it was trying not to step on the floor drain. And we’d be doing this right outside an exam room where someone was doing something finicky, like a spinal tap.”

The 50,000-square-foot center has an outdoor exercise area, 50 stalls, an indoor arena with a customized gait-analysis system, a lab, surgical suites with cameras for remote viewing, a 90-seat conference room, a nutrition center, the most powerful equine MRI in the nation, a treadmill that can clock a horse at 30 mph, and an underwater treadmill for physical therapy.

Despite the amenities, Valberg says the center’s prices are “incredibly reasonable.” Patients range from backyard pleasure horses to top dressage and race horses. Boarders include the U’s mounted-police horses, research and teaching horses, and the gentle We Can Ride horses.

The indoor arena allows We Can Ride to serve kids who have been waiting two years to ride, says Program Development Director Judi French. She hopes to work closely with the U’s occupational therapy, physical therapy, and special education programs. “The Department of Kinesiology has written two research grants to help validate that this therapy truly works,” she says.

The center’s opening coincides with a particularly exciting time for Valberg and Jim Mickelson, professor of veterinary biosciences. They recently discovered a genetic cause for a muscle disease and received a $2.5 million grant to head the Equine Consortium on Medical Genetics (linking 18 academic institutions in nine countries). “I’ve got 3,000 muscle biopsies in my freezer,” Valberg says, “and now we have the ability to figure it all out.”

Today, though, her greatest satisfaction comes from seeing the center in action: “We’ve always said there is a huge need for this out there, and watching it come true is very, very cool.”