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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   27621 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 15, 2024

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In my experience, dairy farmers (and beef cattle farmers) doing their own ultrasounding is very common... When you have herds of hundreds of cattle that you are regularly artificially inseminating, it's just not practical to have a vet out to the farm to do routine preg checks. I can't speak much to the culture war angle, but this really just seems like unnecessary bureaucracy impeding on extremely anodyne agricultural practices

The issue isn't that they were doing their own preg checks, it's that they were operating and advertising a business that did it for other people for a fee. You can write your own will, for instance, but if you write wills for other people it's the unauthorized practice of law. Now, we can make the argument that that requiring a vet to do this is both unnecessary and outside the bounds of the statute, but there are two general problems I forsee with that.

The first is that the introduction of technology makes a lot of things that used to be the domain of trained professionals increasingly accessible to the general public. Take land surveying. Anyone of average intelligence can pull a deed from the courthouse, buy pro-grade survey equipment, and locate a pin, which is probably enough to do the trick if you're trying to see where you can put up a fence on your own property. But the field is deceptively complicated, and when the same guy decides to go into business for himself as a surveyor with no more training than basic YouTube tutorials, he's asking for trouble. The second problem is that most professional fields are so varied that it's impossible to define every specific thing one needs a license to do. The legislature can't run back into session every time someone comes up with a new medical procedure to make sure that you need a license to do it.

As for specific problems with allowing unlicensed people to do preg checks as a business, I can't comment on because I don't know anything about vet science. But if this is something that's plausible then the solution is to lobby the state legislature to clarify the law to specifically allow it; God knows the farm lobby in PA is powerful enough to make it happen if there's that much of a call for it and the only real opposition is from vets that don't like it. But the solution isn't to start a business doing it and ignore the state when they tell you to stop.

The issue isn't that they were doing their own preg checks, it's that they were operating and advertising a business that did it for other people for a fee.

Isn't the complication here that they were running an AI service? So maybe as part of that it was "after your cow is inseminated, we'll do a follow-up check to make sure she's in calf, no foal no fee" arrangement? They weren't selling pregnancy checks as a separate business. I don't know the fine details and there must be more going on here than we know about.

The first is that the introduction of technology makes a lot of things that used to be the domain of trained professionals increasingly accessible to the general public. Take land surveying. Anyone of average intelligence can pull a deed from the courthouse, buy pro-grade survey equipment, and locate a pin, which is probably enough to do the trick if you're trying to see where you can put up a fence on your own property. But the field is deceptively complicated, and when the same guy decides to go into business for himself as a surveyor with no more training than basic YouTube tutorials, he's asking for trouble.

This seems fine? So long as that person is not allowed to claim to be a licensed land surveyor who's surveys will be accepted by, like, the Land Titles Office (much less the neighbours) -- consumers can probably decide for themselves whether such a survey is of value to them? (hint: the only time anybody is likely to get something surveyed it's because some government agency (or maybe the neighbours) is forcing them to; if that agency won't accept the results the survey is worth zero dollars

The legislature can't run back into session every time someone comes up with a new medical procedure to make sure that you need a license to do it.

Yes they can. Because "you may do nothing without a license unless we specifically say so" is not the law.

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