Rules are largely a distraction

“The oth­er thing that bugs me about the wel­fare groups is that they think that keep­ing live­stock can be reduced to geom­e­try. They like to write rules that hens need a cer­tain amount of perch space, some num­ber of square feet of floor space, and so on. (It reminds me of the incred­i­bly lame pro­pa­gan­da com­ing over Radio Moscow and Radio Peking in the Sev­en­ties, which could­n’t tell the dif­fer­ence between steel pro­duc­tion and qual­i­ty of life.)

But in real­i­ty, rules are large­ly just a dis­trac­tion from the seri­ous busi­ness of pay­ing atten­tion to what’s going on, and chang­ing what you do accord­ing­ly. It’s the dif­fer­ence between man­ag­ing the process and man­ag­ing the out­come. You can often get the same out­come using wild­ly dif­fer­ing tech­niques, depend­ing on how you bal­ance dif­fer­ent trade-offs. Actu­al skill is involved. ”
‑R. Plamondon

My kind of guy.  Down to earth, out there doing the good work, get­ting after it.  Reminds me of Steve Solomon.

Dig it.  http://www.plamondon.com/faq_welfare.html

NFH