I enjoyed reading the feature story in Sunday’s Daily Iberian about Nina Velazquez, who, with her husband and two children, raise miniature horses at their place on East Admiral Doyle Drive.

“Miniature horses are exactly like horses, but everything about them is miniature,” Velazquez was quoted as saying.

Reading this story took me back to my days studying journalism at LSU and reporting for The Daily Reveille, the school’s newspaper.

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I was assigned two “beats” to cover for the paper, LSU men’s basketball and the school of Veterinary Science. I can’t remember exactly how it came about, but I was assigned a story that was to appear in The (Baton Rouge) Advocate, about how the veterinary school was using miniature horses in a study of equine infectious anemia.

My primary source for this story was a professor who had a hard time putting his research efforts into terms a young J-school student could understand. I remember how he’d use what seemed like very technical terms to explain different aspects of what they were doing in their research with the miniature horses.

I was very intimidated and felt pretty dumb about trying to understand what this guy was telling me, and was pretty worried about how the heck I was going to explain this in a story readers could understand.

I was constantly saying, “What does that mean?” trying to get an overview in plain enough English I could understand it.

As I recall, I met with the guy several times in my effort to get an understanding of their efforts using the miniature horses. I finally managed to get my story written and was proud when The Advocate published it.

All these years later as I recall, the idea was pretty basic — that the miniature horses were pretty much identical to the full-sized versions so much so that were effective as test subjects for the research project related to this disease that was spread, I think, by mosquitoes.

The benefit of using the miniature horses was the testing was the same, but the cost of caring for the miniature horses was way less, as they didn’t eat as much, didn’t take up as much space, etc.

Hopefully the miniature horses owned by the Velazquez family are safe from equine infectious anemia because of that research of so many years ago.

While still traveling down memory lane about my days writing for The Reveille, I have to admit covering LSU’s basketball team was a lot more exciting for a young college man than the veterinary science beat.

Longtime basketball coach Dale Brown was in the first years of his long LSU career. Kenny Higgs was the biggest “star” of the team I can recall, a small but tough 5-foot, 11-inch guard from Kentucky who was great fun to watch.

It was big stuff to get a few one-on-one interviews with Coach Brown, who was just as animated and full of interesting quotes and stories with me as he was famous for in all sorts of interviews with big-time media types over the years.

He was a lot more fun and a lot easier to understand than the guys at the veterinary school.

WILL CHAPMAN is publisher of The Daily Iberian.