Veterinarian Bill Stone of the Katy Equine Clinic began working in veterinary care right out of high school at the Katy Veterinary Clinic, he said. He then moved on to work at the Katy Equine Clinic in 1984 after completing his undergrad and doctorate at Texas A&M.

“My family showed horses for years and, as a joke, the story is that I wasn’t a very good rider, so I went to [veterinary] school,” Stone said.

The Katy Equine Clinic, which sits on about 3 acres of land and has 15 stalls for patients, specializes in veterinary medicine for horses of all sorts, said Stone.

The 30-year-old clinic is divided into three sub-practices, Stone said. The first offers care to horses that owners utilize for pleasure riding and simpler work on a farm. The second provides care to performance horses that compete in dressage or other competitions, while the third offers what Stone calls referral services.

Caring for pleasure horses involves basic veterinary care, Stone said. This could be treating a cut or performing other basic procedures needed by horses in the Katy area. Other services can include dietary advice, vaccinations or helping a mare deliver a foal, he said.

The referral services involve putting the best practitioners on the cases that the clinic sees, Stone said. That may mean Stone will travel to a patient to do a long bone repair on a horse’s broken leg, or it could alternately involve calling in a specialist to take on a procedure that Stone feels that another veterinarian has more expertise in.

“I mean really, the point is the horse comes first,” Stone said. “Our commitment is trying to put the best person in front of the horse as possible.”

Specialty horse care allows the practice to ensure expensive show horses who may have a minor level of lameness are comfortable enough to perform without making injuries worse, he said.

“Competitions cost [owners] thousands of dollars per weekend. So, when they go, we want to make sure that they’re successful,” Stone said. “We make sure those horses are performing optimally.”

Among the three practices, Stone said he and his staff treat 350 to 500 horses per month, with an average of around 500. This includes referral services with partnering practices.

Stone said he returned to the Katy Equine Clinic to begin his career after completing college. Stone wanted to specialize in surgery, and Mike Heitmann, the owner who ran the practice at the time, was able to perform all of the surgeries that came into the clinic.

While getting a horse back on its feet is rewarding, the best part of the job is the people he gets to know through his practice, Stone said. The people are what brought him back to the Katy area and the Katy Equine Clinic in 2010 after a residency and running his own out-of-state practice for a while.

Stone said since moving back he’s met a weapons engineer, an oil tanker captain and even the brain surgeon that will treat his office manager’s husband.

Moving back to the clinic allowed him to take over when Heitman retired a few years ago. Stone then bought the clinic from the Florida-based group Heitman had managed it for and returned it to local ownership.

Stone said he felt it was important for someone who had grown up on a ranch just a few miles from the clinic to take care of local families’ animals, rather than an out-of-state corporation.

Stone is nurturing the business to keep its local roots. The practice currently has an intern who grew up in the area and is attending veterinary school, and staff that have been with the practice for years all have backgrounds in horsemanship.

“We kind of all started off as horsemen and had some attachment to horses at some point in our lives, whether its showing horses or raising horses,” Stone said.