10/05/2025
A veterinarian at a recent veterinary conference has raised alarming concerns about the rampant corporate takeover of the veterinary industry. She reports that veterinarians are inundated with weekly calls from corporations and private equity firms seeking to buy their practices. This aggressive pursuit is drastically driving up the cost of veterinary care and adversely affecting patient services.
"I want to tell you about a conversation that I had with another vet while I was at the conference. This vet, she's the owner of a six-doctor practice. The practice has been in business for over 75 years. She is only the second owner, so it's always been owned by an individual, and she and her husband own it now, and it's a very successful practice.
What she told me is that she's getting older and she's starting to think about retirement, and she has probably eight or ten more years of being in practice. And after I asked her, I said, are people bombarding you? Are corporations bombarding you to buy your practice? And she said, yes, they are. It's constantly, every single week, she has multiple corporations that are approaching her with great offers to buy her practice. And she said what the problem is, is that this practice is worth a lot of money, and the corporations will pay more for my practice than anyone else. And she said, when I go to sell this practice, I would be willing to take a loss to be able to sell the practice to an individual instead of a corporation.
But she said my friend actually just did that. She took a loss for the value of her practice and sold her practice to an individual. And then the individual that she sold her practice to for a loss, basically flipped her practice like you flip a house. That individual only owned her practice for two months, and then she resold the practice to a corporation and was able to make a considerable profit after only owning it for two months.
So this is a huge problem in the veterinary industry. When I'm at this conference with all of these very boutique, artisan, amazing veterinarians that are so passionate about what they do, the biggest thing that they talk about is this corporate takeover of the veterinary industry. Mars now owns so many of the vets, so many of the ERs, and now animal insurance companies. So it's just steamrolling the industry and it really affects the patient care and every step of the process.
So what can you do about it as a consumer? Seek out veterinary hospitals that are owned by an individual. Call them, ask them who owns them. Because the only way that we will change this situation is if the consumer becomes more knowledgeable about the process and gravitates toward veterinary practices that are owned by individuals, so that they're not worth as much money to corporations anymore. This is what we all have to do together, is to support small businesses and small practitioners in order to have better patient care, better outcomes, and more passionate veterinarians that aren't a slave to the corporate industry."
