Why Private Equity is Swallowing Up America’s Independent Veterinary Clinics

Nothing seems particularly different when you walk into the majority of veterinary clinics in America today. The same faded poster about heartworm prevention on the wall, the same jar of dog treats on the counter at the reception desk, and the same familiar scent of anxiety and antiseptic that any pet owner has experienced over years of visits. It’s possible that the veterinarian who greets you is the same one you’ve seen for ten years. However, the clinic you believe you know is no longer what it once was in an increasing number of cases. It was sold to a private equity firm based in Luxembourg or New York in a covert, unannounced transaction that most likely went unreported.
It’s not a coincidence. It is a component of the model.
Most people, including many veterinarians, were unprepared for the speed and fervor with which private equity has swept through the American veterinary sector over the last ten years. Less than ten percent of all veterinary clinics in the United States were owned by corporations or private equity-backed chains just over ten years prior; by 2024, that number had risen to between thirty and fifty percent. Nowadays, about 75% of specialty and emergency practices—the ones you call at midnight when something goes horribly wrong—fall under the purview of big corporations. According to PitchBook, companies like KKR, JAB Consumer Partners, and TSG Consumer have spent a total of $45 billion on veterinary transactions since just 2017. It’s not a trend. It’s a land grab.

Once you grasp the ruthlessness of the financial logic, it becomes almost elegant. Investors refer to the veterinary industry as a fragmented market because, until recently, it was made up of thousands of small, privately owned practices. Private equity specifically seeks out fragmented markets. For a small multiple of its yearly profits, a company can purchase a clinic, then buy more and more, combining them into a regional or national platform that will fetch a significantly higher price when it is finally sold to the next buyer. This is known as multiple arbitrage, and it generates substantial returns for investors without necessitating any real improvements to the companies being purchased. It is not necessary for the clinics to improve. All they need to do is grow larger.
Selling to a corporate consolidator has frequently appeared to be the only viable option for retiring veterinarians, of which there are currently many as a generation of practice owners approaches the end of their careers. Due in part to crippling student loan debt, there is a dearth of young veterinarians who are willing and able to purchase a practice, which has led to a buyer’s market dominated by organizations that can write the biggest checks. Grant Jacobson, a veterinarian from Iowa, worked for almost 20 years to become the owner of the practice where he was employed. However, the founder sold to a chain owned by Mars for more than a million dollars more than he had offered. Antitrust attorneys in practically every other industry would find it unsettling that Mars, best known for M&Ms, now owns Banfield Pet Hospitals, BluePearl specialty hospitals, pet food companies, and pet pharmacies.
It is difficult to ignore the fact that those least able to handle the effects of all this consolidation bear the brunt of them. The American Economic Liberties Project has attributed the roughly 60% increase in veterinary care costs over the last ten years, in large part, to the pricing power of consolidated chains that take advantage of a market where pet owners believe they have no viable alternatives. Last year, Americans spent a record $147 billion on pet-related goods and services. This figure appears to be a success story until you consider who is profiting from it. The same company that owns National Veterinary Associates, JAB, has surreptitiously acquired several of the biggest pet insurance providers in the US and Europe, which has contributed to an increase in pet insurance premiums. In actuality, the company is involved in both sides of the deal.
The shift is perceived differently within the clinics themselves. About a year into the company’s ownership, Melissa Ezell, a veterinarian at a National Veterinary Associates clinic in Huntsville, Alabama, described observing the change—first subtle, then less subtle. Vets were under pressure from management to meet daily revenue goals. The advice was to look for additional services to provide if a pet owner was not going to spend enough at a particular appointment. The timetable became more constrained. It seemed like the appointments were shorter. “Before, I never felt any pressure to be making a certain amount of money in a day,” she stated to Stateline. “It was just, ‘Fill your schedule, practice good medicine, everything else will come.'” Eventually, she moved on to a nearby privately run clinic. Not every town still has one, and not every veterinarian has that choice.
Another issue is the ignorance of pet owners. National Veterinary Associates is one of the biggest corporate chains that purposefully refuses to rebrand the practices they acquire. The clinic retains its original name, original signage, and occasionally its original personnel. Almost no one checks the state business registries where the ownership change is recorded. As a result, corporations are, in the words of one researcher, “hiding in plain sight”—a type of transparency that only exists on paper. When a pet owner enters a clinic with a sense of community, it is difficult to determine whether the clinic’s pricing decisions are being made in the boardroom or in the exam room in Luxembourg.
There has been uneven and sluggish regulatory pressure. In order to approve one of JAB’s acquisitions in 2022, the FTC demanded that it sell off a few clinics spread across five states. In 2024, Senators Richard Blumenthal and Elizabeth Warren formally expressed concern about Mars’s market dominance. Some states, including Iowa, Minnesota, New York, and North Carolina, have laws that, in theory, forbid non-veterinarians from owning veterinary practices. However, proponents claim that these laws are being circumvented through intricate ownership arrangements that are challenging to understand and even more difficult to enforce.
There is a sense that the veterinary sector is roughly five years behind what happened to human healthcare as a result of watching this develop over a number of years. Similar justifications—efficiency, technology, and capital—were used to justify private equity’s involvement in hospitals and nursing homes, and the results were similar: increased expenses, employee burnout, and a slow decline in the type of judgment-based care that is difficult to optimize. Whether the veterinary version of that tale has a different conclusion is still up for debate. The FTC is becoming more vigilant. Stronger oversight is being considered by some states. Additionally, a few groups led by veterinarians are trying to provide a third option that is based on professional values and local ownership rather than five-year exit timelines. This option falls somewhere between being fully independent and fully corporate. It’s genuinely unclear if they can make enough room to matter.
The direction of travel is certain. There will be more clinics acquired. Nothing replaced the emergency hospital in your metro area that was owned by Thrive prior to its closure. Thrive, which is owned by TSG Consumer and runs more than 380 hospitals, was located in Rochester, New York. Due in part to the staff’s vote to unionize, a city with over a million residents was left without a 24-hour emergency veterinary option. According to the company, there is a staffing shortage. That wasn’t totally believed by the local county legislator who had been bringing her dogs to the clinic for years. She might have been mistaken. Closures like that one might be an inevitable part of the model rather than an anomaly due to the incentives at play in private equity-owned veterinary care.