About

How it all started:

Dr. Jean Cotton, the founder of Avenues Pet Clinic, was a pioneer in the Cheyenne veterinary medicine community. Suddenly finding herself a single mother in 1971, Jean was left with her daughters, her courage and wisdom, and a fierce determination for her life to mean something.

When Jean visited with an advisor in Laramie and told him she wanted to go to veterinary school, he mocked her ambition. She came home that day and immediately purchased books to study for, and eventually pass, the entrance exams for the University of Wyoming. After completing her pre-veterinary college coursework, her dream became reality when she was accepted into the Colorado State University College of Veterinary Medicine in 1977. Not wanting to uproot her daughters, she commuted throughout the four year program to minimize the burden on her children.

Dr. Cotton graduated in 1980 only to find that none of the Cheyenne veterinary practices would hire her.  Still struggling to make ends meet she took matters into her own hands and converted her garage into an emergency clinic where she started to establish herself with the pet-owning community in Cheyenne.

In May 1983, she opened Avenues Pet Clinic on 8th Avenue and early on hired Dr. Rod Hartshorn, an Air Force veterinarian recently assigned to F.E. Warren AFB. With her savvy management and ethical business practices the clinic quickly grew.  Over time she built Avenues into an extended hour multi-doctor general and emergency practice. In 1986 the practice relocated to 5520 Yellowstone Road where it resides today.

In 2005 her daughter, Ruth, and Dr. Hartshorn purchased ownership of Avenues Pet Clinic from Dr. Cotton. Katy, her other daughter, stayed on the Board keeping the practice a family affair.  In 2016, three years after Dr. Cotton’s passing, Ruth and Dr. Hartshorn sold partial ownership of Avenues Pet Clinic to Curo Pet Care while remaining the primary partner in the practice. In 2021, Avenues Pet Clinic welcomed a new partner in Dr. Ashlee Jones who also stepped up as Medical Director of the practice.

Avenues today:

Under Dr. Ashlee Jones’ leadership, our team of committed and compassionate veterinarians including Dr. Rod Hartshorn, Dr. Randy Smith, Dr. April Zander, and Dr. Kaitlin Kaiser we are proud to continue the legacy of care started all those years ago by Dr. Cotton. We believe our practice’s Core Values honor what she started and nurtured through her many years of practice. They will always be our ongoing commitment to our community:

Our most precious resource is you – client, patient, team member.  You are our partner.  These are our Core Values which we will demonstrate in our goals, words and actions at all times.

We will always ask how we can be of service to you. We promise always to listen to you, to empathize with you, to celebrate with you, to sympathize with you, to support you and to help you in any way we can.

Our success depends on our combined efforts. We acknowledge that we do not know everything but that by working together from a place of trust and good intentions we can find a solution to almost any problem.

Our success depends on listening to each other and communicating openly and honestly. We will show gratitude for you and your contributions through our words and actions at all times.

We keep our promises and honor our commitments. You can count and depend on us.

We are human and therefore fallible. We highly value and ask for your feedback, whether it is to tell us that we were helpful to you at a difficult time, or to let us know how we should handle things better and differently and be of greater service to you in the future.