YOU should become a LOBBYIST!

Honorable Mention, Experiences category
Samantha McDonnel, UC Davis

Okay I’m going to keep this brief because I know you veterinary students have an attention span of about 0.034 seconds.  Ughh, I probably already lost some of you…  And that’s only if you glanced down at this title for long enough after tabbing over to Facebook from your pathology notes during one of your professor’s digressions, and decided to keep reading.

For those select few who are still with me… you’re probably thinking that you don’t want to be a lobbyist (ew); you want to be a veterinarian, and actually, you know, do some benefit for society and make your mom proud (things lobbyists clearly never accomplish).  But if you reach the end of this article, I hope you take away one thing: ANYONE can be a (part-time) lobbyist!  

I, Samantha McDonnel, current DVM/PhD student, was a lobbyist in February in Washington DC, petitioning our congresspeople (yes, that is the term, get used to it) to vote certain ways on certain issues.  Hanie Elfenbein (another UCD DVM/PhD student) and I attended the AVMA legislative fly-in and went to the offices of California Sen. Barbara Boxer, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, and Rep. Mike Thompson (District 1) to lobby on two pieces of legislation of great importance to our profession: the ‘Animal Fighting Spectator Prohibition Act’ and the ‘Fairness to Pet Owners Act.’  What’s that you say?  You’ve never heard of these things??  Of course not.  You’re a student, and you probably don’t even know much about national current events.  But there might come a point (soon) when you have heard of such bills, and when it really matters to you whether or not they pass.

So it turns out that anyone can just call up their Senator/Representative’s office and ask to meet with them.  Yeah, anyone.  And if you can’t make the jog over to DC, you can also meet with them over the phone.  Even more surprisingly, they actually care what you have to say, and take your opinion into account when making important decisions.  (If this totally blows your mind you’re starting to think I’m a crazy person, consider that you are a constituent and therefore a VOTER, and it’s even better if you seem like a loud/involved voter who talks to other VOTERS).  And our profession, as you might imagine, is highly esteemed and seen as quite the authority on issues related to animals.  Moreover, these issues (potential laws) WILL affect your every-day life (example: the ‘Fairness to Pet Owners Act’ would require that you write out and hand-deliver a Rx for EVERY medication you prescribe, regardless of whether you’re filling it at your own hospital, and regardless of whether the client’s chosen pharmacy is actually an illegal/sketchy operation importing drugs from China and liability might fall on your shoulders.  Seriously).  In other words, some of these things are well worth your time and effort now.

To summarize (aka, this paragraph is the last-slide-of-the-lecture analogue):  Legislators on both the state and national level are making decisions every day that WILL affect you.  You can be involved in that process by calling/writing/e-mailing/meeting them and letting them know where you stand (veterinarian AND lobbyist = lobovet).  Finally, these are real people, and they will listen to you.  No one person can make that big of a difference (sorry 3rd-grade teachers), but a body of well-respected DVMs can, and have, and need to more often.