You’ve got a being that nature intended to be a lawnmower.
We’re asking it to be an athlete.
Down here, this is extremely good for the, adding circulation to the hoof growth
and it’s also an endorphin point.
This is Jax. He is about a nine-year-old off the track thoroughbred
who is currently training for three-day eventing.
I got into animal massage probably twelve years ago, thirteen years ago.
In many respects, it’s very, not only very cost-effective, it gives the rider
a better horse to go out and compete with. It’s happier.
Late in the summer of, I think, 2012, I received
a letter from the Arizona State Veterinary Medical Board.
About two months later, I received a cease-and-desist letter.
Kelly needs to be a licensed vet to charge a fee for her craft, so they gave her two options:
either stop practicing massage or do it for free.
Becoming a licensed veterinarian is a burdensome process, it’s like becoming a doctor, and
you do not need to do it in order to massage horses, and, in fact, there are private certification
classes which these women had taken that helped them learn how to do it correctly.
The boards in Arizona are primarily set up as, sort of, independent from everyone else.
They are established by the legislature and given powers by the legislature
and they’re nominally executive boards.
The industry writes the language in the legislation to create the regulatory board and how it’s
structured and what is defined as their profession.
Naturally, I went to the vet board’s website and found the statute in question, which was
so broad and so vague and so amorphous, that, if you took it literally, almost anything
that someone did with a horse could almost be construed as the practice of veterinary medicine.
You go home and pet your neighbors’ cat and charge them five dollars to do it,
you could fall under the veterinary laws in Arizona.
So, that made them believe they had the authority to step in
and tell a massage therapist to cease and desist their practice.
We all operated under the supposition that they did have jurisdiction.
I couldn’t go to horse shows like I used to and advertise my presence.
Most people, when they learn of the requirements to be able to get a license to be able to
start a business, would be absolutely amazed.
This is sometimes years and years of bureaucratic red tape.
And, I understand having licensing for things that consumers may not be able to judge, right?
Like, so you want your pilot, probably, to be licensed, or your surgeon, right?
In the 50s, less than five percent of the U.S. workforce needed a license
and today it’s between 25 and 30 percent.
You need to have a license to blow dry somebody’s hair.
You need to have a license to taxidermy animals, to repair somebody’s door, to translate
sign language, and to be a coach.
There’s acupuncturists, massage therapists, barbers,
cosmetologists, animal cremationists, naturopathic providers.
There have been a number of efforts, in Arizona recently, to reform a number of these issues.
So, we will hear 2613 next.
I will no longer be able to go to California, Colorado, or any of the other Western states
and compete for business in those states.
Loss of licensure would put our state, our landscape architects, and our universities
at a severe competitive disadvantage.
You would also jeopardize the health, safety, and welfare of the general public.
My clients are busy, they’re doing their work. They want to make sure that when they
hire a professional to do their landscape architecture, they’re hiring a licensed professional.
It was eye-opening to me to see how many opponents of licensing reform there were out there.
If it didn’t affect public health or public safety, we wanted to make it as wide open
for people to come into some of these industries as possible.
Economists like Morris Kleiner and Alan Krueger have concluded that occupational licensing
imposes costs on the American economy in the range of about 200 billion dollars a year
and it kills about 2.8 million jobs a year.
That’s going to lead to higher prices and it’s going to lead to
fewer job opportunities for people breaking into that field.
It’s really good if you’re one of those people, but it’s bad for everyone else.
After the depositions, it became law that massage therapy is not the practice of
veterinary medicine and the state veterinary board has no jurisdiction
over massage, animal massage therapy.
Now this clarification, this demarcation; every other therapist in the state,
they are now freer than they were before.
You could say that they sent a letter to the wrong person, which they did. [Laughs]