Brooke Spieker

Brooke Spieker hails from Lewes, Delaware, “a super small town where the farmland meets the sea.” Growing up, she spent equal time at the beach and the barn, known as one of the “barn rats” at the local stable. Brooke participated in Pony Club and evented her Appendix mare, Lilly. Her first job was as a camp counselor at a horseback riding summer camp.

Brooke applied only to colleges in California, because she knew from a young age that she wanted to live on the West Coast. While at the University of California at Santa Barbara, Brooke achieved her B.A. in Anthropology, but she still found ways to focus on animals: She studied horse domestication and how the environment affects their physiology. She learned about the human-animal bond and how universal it is across different cultures and time. Before committing to a museum job or further research, Brooke worked at a Trakehner breeding barn for a year after college, and realized a life indoors without animals was not for her. So, she began to collect her veterinary prerequisites and went on to earn her DVM at the University of Arizona College of Veterinary Medicine. Among Brooke’s favorite memories from her clinical year are: Meeting Spirit (mustang muse for the movie), performing a laceration repair on an opossum; milking a mare to feed her foal with contracted limbs; and releasing an osprey back into the wild after rehabilitation.

Equine medicine combines Brooke’s love of learning and problem solving with her passion for horses and the people who care for them. She appreciates getting to spend her days outside, meet new people, and continue to learn about horses. She is excited to focus on equine general practice and sports medicine during her internship in order to increase her confidence in the basics before considering pursuing a large animal specialty: She finds both Internal Medicine and Surgery equally interesting.

Brooke moved back to California from Arizona with her partner, Guillermo. They have a senior dog named Huckleberry and a mischievous young cat named Robert. (Brooke has fostered over 65 animals, and Robert has been her one and only “foster fail” — so far). While she misses having a horse of her own, for now Brooke really enjoys dedicating her time to helping others have the happiest and healthiest equine partners.