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community weblog
Private equity: neutering independent vets since 2010.
Too chonk to fail. Private Equity Vet lets you see if your local D.V.M. is just a PE with a lab coat. (previously)
posted by MiltonRandKalman on Apr 17, 2026 at 1:28 PM
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I know PE is bad but I didn't think they were making the labs into coats.
posted by atoxyl at 1:31 PM
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Teaching hospitals or bust. Very grateful my dogs can get care at the Chicago extension of the U of I vet med school. It means we've had a lot of different people because they're often rotating out and through, but everyone is always eager, engaged, well trained, and motivated to take their time and talk through everything going on with my boys. If you've got that option near you, please take it!
posted by phunniemee at 1:34 PM
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Yeah, if it weren't for the couple of vets and techs there that we know and love we'd have left our now owned by VCA vet practice. The old partners sold it to VCA when they were getting ready to retire and it went from a slightly down at the heels shabby building with excellent docs and decent prices to a much nicer facility but more expensive prices.
posted by drewbage1847 at 1:43 PM
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This happened to my local vet when he retired. I'm assuming it's the usual story of older professionals needing to sell their business in order to afford retirement and younger professionals being unable to buy because they're so saddled with student debt. Enter PE which "solves" both problems by helping the previous generation cash out while graciously employing the next generation and denying them the opportunity to build any equity of their own and jacking up the prices.
At least my dentist took on an apprentice as an employee that he then gradually passed the practice on to. Private Equity is also buying up a lot of dentists.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 1:44 PM
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Interesting. My wife was unhappy with the vet we'd been using for some four years, so we just this week started visiting another, which she's very happy with. Turns out, per this website, that the previous vet is owned by a private equity firm. The pieces are adding up.
Counterpoint: We've had to bring two pets to the local VCA (a corporate franchise vet) for specialty care. In both cases, the care they received was excellent (if expensive), and the doctors themselves have been unusually knowledgable and communicative.
posted by Dr. Wu at 1:47 PM
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Private equity has the Midas touch. Everything it touches turns to gold for them, and thus useless shit for the rest of us.
posted by nat at 1:47 PM
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If your vet has pamphlets in the examining room about applying for credit to pay for your pet's treatment, the practice is probably owned by private equity.
Having made some hard decisions about pets in my lifetime, those pamphlets make me sick every time I see them.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 1:51 PM
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Depends on the pamphlets. CareCare has made my cats' dental cleaning/extractions a bit less painful, for me at least. Those assholes are worse about flossing than me.
posted by MiltonRandKalman at 2:03 PM
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Private equity has snapped up pretty much all the vet clinics in my area; the ones that haven't been aren't taking on anymore pets. I'm not saying vet care was cheap, but it was a lot less expensive only a handful of years ago.
posted by Kitteh at 2:05 PM
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This has happened to our vet and it's tragic. Luckily the actual trained people working directly with the animals are still mostly the same, including our go-to doctor for our cats and the tech who helped us through some hard times with our previous cat during the end of his life. If there comes a day either of them quit I suspect we will try to follow them to their new positions or have to begin the horrible task of finding a new vet practice.
Last time we were in for a checkup I had a whole discussion about how to get the horrendous flood of emails from them to stop pouring into my inbox. Evidently there's something like eight different categories of mailing lists that you're auto subscribed to whenever you confirm your email address for getting a digital bill sent to you, and I have to unsubscribe from each one by finding a teeny link in the very bottom and hoping that would be the last, while still needing to not shunt them all directly to spam so I can actually get communication about my cats.
Our vet practice used to be a beloved local institution, one of the oldest in a city known for loving pets, renowned for preventative care and even had a tradition of resident blood donor cats with their own corkboard of saved patient photos celebrating their contributions. Now it feels like every few months or so some part of the remaining pedigree is chopped off and replaced with an insurance advertisement. Seattle loves its companion animals but I'm not sure it loves them more than short term profits so my hope for local policy makers to help is minimal, but you never know.
posted by Mizu at 2:11 PM
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This shit is why my sister gave up being a vet and went back to school at age 50. She says it just became too miserable to keep working in that type of corporate profit-first environment.
I know a couple other vets that threw in the towel and became beekeepers instead. Getting stung by bees on a regular basis was preferable.
posted by fimbulvetr at 2:34 PM
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Feels like a good time to throw it out there - hate on the corporations, not the vets. The suicide rate for vets is horrific and I make donations to Not One More Vet from time to time.
posted by drewbage1847 at 2:42 PM
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Prescription: regulation and plenty of it.
posted by caviar2d2 at 2:43 PM
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First thing I asked my vet is who owned them. They're fiercely independent and I'm extremely grateful to them for remaining so.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 2:48 PM
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Glad to see my vet isn't on the map. I have been getting emails lately with his clinic's name on them trying to sell me pet meds and stuff my cats don't need, but maybe that's what he does now to help make a little extra money?
posted by The Ardship of Cambry at 3:04 PM
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The same thing is happening with autism services. PE is ruining the health of all creatures great and small.
posted by njohnson23 at 3:04 PM
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My vet isn't on the map, although I see one of the others in the area is. At my family's previous home, VCA facilities were the only ones available, but were all fine (albeit pricy).
posted by thomas j wise at 3:22 PM
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I was having bad feelings about the vet we'd been using so I asked friends for recommendations. Meanwhile I looked up reviews for the vet practice and saw several mentions of PE ownership along with similar stories as mine-- being pushed for dental insurance or some type of umbrella coverage (that would not apply to senior cat care) without actually improving the animal health much. Lots of emails and texts to join up.
The new vet is terrific, and what we assumed was senior cat behavior turns out to be dehydration and listlessness that was easily treatable with OTC therapies. Never recommended by the PE vet, just more pain killers at 400% markup.
posted by winesong at 4:07 PM
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Just checked on the largest vet group I've seen in the Netherlands - Ana Cura - and sure enough, according to the Ana Cura Group website, they're owned by Mars.
The vet we're using is not part of Ana Cura, though they do refer people to them for emergency care. As far as I can tell, our practice is privately owned; it was founded in 2022 and doesn't seem to have corporate overlords. Hmm.
posted by Flight Hardware, do not touch at 5:54 AM
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My partner is a vet and has owed his own practice for 40 some years. He was approached by a corporation 12 years ago when he was 60. He looked into it and came to the conclusion it wouldn't be financially wise on top of being bad for his clients. Part of the deal was that he would continue working 3 years at almost half the salary he was paying himself plus giving up any profits. The cash payout for the practice still fell well under what his expected earnings would be for 3 years. This practice was built by him working 60+ hours a week for decades. He charges well below other independent practices let alone the swath of new PE owned practices. He has looked for a vet to buy it but hasn't found anyone despite offering a generous buy-in plan. New grads seem to want the corporate route of employment without the commitment or up front cost. His clients are very grateful for his clinic and he hasn't been able to bring in new clients for quite done time, he is swamped. At 72 he has no plans to retire even though financially he could. His dad was the same; he owned his optometry practice until he was 85 and still saw a few patients in his home office/exam room until he passed at 101.
posted by waving at 5:56 AM
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I learned about the widespread rot of private equity in the veterinary medicine field when I was helping organize animal hospitals and clinics. Corporate-owned (especially PE-owned) vets will absolutely shut down a clinic if there's a successful union drive, in part because they own so many other practices, usually several in one area or region, that losing one doesn't matter to them. It's bleak as hell.
posted by heteronym at 6:18 AM
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I stayed with VCA while Herbert's doctor was there (she was so lovely) but once she left I was gone. they got so horrible and so expensive and increasing putting all this weird work on the clients instead of themselves. (they wanted me to go to their physical space and pick up a PAPER Rx and then mail it to the pharmacy instead of them just emailing or faxing it directly. WTAF???)
posted by supermedusa at 9:49 AM
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