While I was at our local county fair, watching livestock shows and talking about the most recent legislative session, the similarities between the two struck me more than once.
As a veteran livestock exhibitor – rabbits, market lambs, and cattle – and as someone now involved in public policy, drawing parallels between the two was easy. Here are three things required in livestock showing and public policy:
Patience
If you’ve ever tried to train a wild animal, you know it is tough. It requires tapping into a well of patience for communicating with a critter that doesn’t speak the same language. In some ways, working in public policy is a lot like that. You must find creative ways to connect with people who might have different perspectives, ideas or goals. Finding patience to navigate toward a middle ground with new people has its own challenges but can also lead to rewards like the development of legislation or implementation of your ideas in the public sector.
Persistence
Animals, and people, are creatures of habit. When training livestock, being persistent in establishing a schedule for everything from eating times to daily walks creates a sense of the familiar and helps them learn what to expect when. Persistence in public policy is similar. If you have an idea that is not adopted right away, consistently saying the same thing day-after-day, year-after-year is, sometimes, what it takes to create a habit for an agency, staff member, or legislator.
Practicality
If the space is available, applying some practicality to daily life with livestock is easier than it sounds. Clean living spaces, fresh water, nutritionally wholesome feed, and plenty of room to roam are all practical ways to keep animals happy and healthy. Cost effectiveness, overall appeal, and ease of implementation are the policy equivalents of those practical solutions. They can be harder to determine and require more studying of the political environment, the demographics of the legislature, and the desires of agencies, staffers, and/or legislators but that does not mean they aren’t attainable.
None of these lessons are a guarantee for a win in livestock showing or public policy. They are, however, reminders to keep trying in both arenas. Whether you’re showing an animal or trying to get an idea turned into legislation, there is no perfect way to do the job. Animals will step on you, ideas will get turned into the opposite of what you hoped when they get drafted into a bill, but patience, persistence, and practicality help you pick up where you left off and try again the next day or the next year.