And our two different styles reflect that. You’re very researched; you know what you’re talking about—and me, maybe not so much.

What I have learned about this place is, all our past experiences add to this place—the lived experience, right? The member from Peterborough is nodding. There are things that we’ve all done in our past—that we know something that you didn’t learn in school. That’s important. And in veterinary medicine, we need to look at that, too.

I’d like to switch, because I think I’ve covered the vet part—I might go back to it, but I’ve got a few more cow stories if I run out of time.

Another important part of this bill is the vet tech part. Vet techs are going to be a regulated profession. As veterinary medicine gets much more advanced, much more technical, and as we continue with a shortage of vets, there are many things that a vet tech can do very well; in some cases, maybe not as well as the vet, but maybe better than—and I’m going to again use myself as an example—the livestock owner. But we have to be sure that they’re actually capable, trained to do that, and having them as a registered profession, I think, is a step forward.

I’ll go back to my cow analogy. As I just said, I could never—and I tried it; I am no good at intravenous. I just can’t do intravenous on a cow; I just can’t find the vein, but a vet tech could. So if we can’t get the vet, if the vet is doing something that only the vet can do—a very difficult calving or something—or if there’s a disease outbreak and we need the vet’s not only institutional knowledge but practical knowledge to deal with that, then maybe the vet tech can handle my cow with milk fever. That’s really important.

I don’t want to cause a feud between vets and vet techs, because they work together. They’re also—we hear this a lot from both sides: an interdisciplinary team. Well, that’s vets and vet techs, too. It’s really important.

Actually, one of my staff is a trained vet tech. It’s very interesting, talking to her, because of her lived experience. Cathy Pfeifer is her name. I hope I don’t get in big trouble for saying this, but one of the reasons that makes her great at being a constituency assistant—one of the things that I didn’t realize was so hard about being a vet tech is the personal part. I focused on large animal vets, but if you think about small animals, companion animals, they’re part of your family. If grave decisions have to be made, or if very grave things are going to happen regardless of what you do, it’s the same as losing any other family member.

Vets deal with that too, but vet techs deal with that a lot. If you think about that, that is really, really tough, the social part of that. They deal with people whose—if your companion animal, your dog, your cat has a disease or is hit by something or attacked by a coyote, it’s all-consuming. That falls on the vet tech.

If you think about that—I never really fully until I talked to Cathy. She’s really good at talking to people, and it comes really naturally to her. I didn’t really clue in to why until she started talking about being a vet tech and that actually, in some ways, a constituency assistant was almost easier than a vet tech. And that’s saying something, because we all have people in our offices who do intake, who do—I can’t speak for other offices; I’ll speak for mine. My staff does the majority of the casework. They know more about most things than I do, and they take the toughest stuff. They get it first.

How I learned that—I’m going to go off on another tangent since nobody has done a section 23 on me yet. When I—

Interjection.