The Animal Husbandry Working Group (AHWG) provided its final report to the Minnesota Legislature in mid-January. 

Special thanks to Dr. Josee Gerard for her outstanding representation of Minnesota’s chiropractic community on this committee.  Thanks to her hard work, the AHWG constructed thorough and thoughtful recommendations with regard to animal chiropractic.

Minnesota Animal Chiropractic Care strongly supports the recommendations of this group.  We will encourage legislators to consider these key points as they review legislation resulting from the AHWG’s recommendations:

• Some members of the Minnesota Veterinary Medical Association would like to see access to chiropractors limited by requiring pre-examination and referral by a veterinarian. This is an illogical approach. Less than 2% of Minnesota's veterinarians have taken AVCA-approved post-graduate courses in animal chiropractic. Expecting veterinarians that have not been adequately trained in chiropractic (over 98% of Minnesota's veterinary population) to be able to readily recognize chiropractic conditions is unfair, both to the veterinarian and even more so to the animal who will not receive the referral for the chiropractic care that it needs. PLEASE SUPPORT LEGISLATION THAT ALLOWS CHIROPRACTORS TO BE PORTAL OF ENTRY PROVIDERS FOR ANIMALS, JUST AS THEY ARE FOR THE WOMEN, MEN AND CHILDREN OF MINNESOTA.
• Chiropractors providing services to animals should not conduct themselves in an intellectual vacuum. We believe co-management (veterinarian and chiropractor working together) is the best possible scenario for the animal. The changes to statute and rule that we are proposing REQUIRE TIMELY POST-TREATMENT COMMUNICATION BETWEEN THE TREATING CHIROPRACTOR AND THE ANIMAL'S PRIMARY CARE VETERINARIAN.
• Our organization believes the supervision of one doctor by another seems somewhat protectionist, especially when the supervising doctor may have no training in the therapy being supervised. In order to maintain reasonable logistics and expense for animal caregivers, and to ensure that animals have the most expedient access possible to chiropractic care when needed, we recommend that Doctors of Chiropractic be allowed to provide services to animals WITHOUT VETERINARY SUPERVISION REQUIREMENTS.

MACC reached it's first landmark goal of 500 "Contact Your Legislators" contacts as of February 1, 2008. Special thanks to Hal Brown, DC, of Back in the Game Chiropractic in Apple Valley, for his enthusiastic support of this effort.

Remarkably, 96% of the Senate districts in the state are represented in this group of contacts. This proves that this is certainly NOT just a metro area issue.

Although we are thrilled to have reached this landmark number, we ask you to keep encouraging your friends and families to utilize our "Contact Your Legislators" link - these contacts are a very important lobbying tool!