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PRIVATE EQUITY IS TAKING OVER YOUR VETERINARIAN  
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David Moscrop
July 18, 2026
Jacobin
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_ Private equity is taking over veterinary services, driving up
prices, and putting the pets we love at risk through its relentless
pursuit of financial extractio _

The website Private Equity Vet keeps a running list and map of
corporate- or private-equity-owned vets around the world. By the
latest count, there are over 12,000 such outfits in the US and Canada,
and over 2,000 in the UK — and the list is growing. , (Hans
Gutknecht / MediaNews Group / Los Angeles Daily News via Getty Images)


 

In the world of money managers and big capital, anything that
doesn’t belong to the ultrawealthy is a temporary inconvenience, an
aberration waiting and begging to be set right. Private equity (PE)
specializes in using its immense hordes of capital, leverage, and
networks to buy up everything in sight before jacking up prices,
lowering service standards, stripping companies of assets, or some
combination of the above. It’s a cynical and destructive strategy,
and those behind it don’t care what it costs you. Indeed, costing is
the whole idea for private equity’s depredations. If they don’t
get to you one way, they’ll get to you another.

Short of a book-length disquisition on the subject, it’s impossible
to properly catalog the extent to which PE’s extractive proboscises
have inserted themselves into the infrastructure of our day-to-day
lives. But a quick roundup of some of its more nefarious greatest hits
can give some sense of PE’s scale: operators are dipping their
fingers into the tens of billions in taxpayer dollars spent on nursing
homes every year, and studies show
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that homes in which they’ve invested have higher mortality rates and
lower standards of care. PE has helped push aside
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the nonprofits that used to oversee youth sport, where families have
seen a 46 percent cost increase
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for their child’s primary sport since 2019. Through “development
finance
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PE has disguised predatory financial extraction as foreign aid in the
Global South.

The list of PE depredations goes on and on, from exacerbating
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the housing crisis to provoking health care bankruptcies
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to jeopardizing the airplane repair business
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and fire truck manufacturing
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critics claim [[link removed]] that PE
consolidation of the emergency vehicle market played a part in
worsening the 2025 Los Angeles fires). It’s fair to say that PE’s
touch is a disgusting inversion of King Midas’s. While everything he
touched turned to gold, for consumers, everything PE touches turns to
shit.

Last year, private equity put Canada’s oldest retailer
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the ground. Years before, foreign capital had started sniffing around
Canadian health services
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looking to import the American model across the forty-ninth parallel
at scale. The strategy was simple: big capital would enter the market
by buying up practices in the fields of dental care, optometry, and
pharmacy and turn them into chains obsessed with maximizing profit and
minimizing service. Nothing is out of bounds.

If all this was not bad enough, PE has recently turned its dead-eyed
gaze on our pets. The private equity push into health care services
throughout Canada and the United States has included veterinary
medicine. This means that not even humanity’s best friends will be
safe from the vultures who will never have to worry about whether they
can afford to take their beloved pet — or, rather, pay someone else
to do so — to receive the care it needs.

All Things Bright and Beautiful

In December 2024, Alice Teller warned
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that private equity in the United Kingdom was encroaching on
veterinary services, raising prices and bullying workers, closing up
shops whenever anyone had the utter temerity to ask for something as
absurd as decent working conditions and a fair wage. And as the
private equity push accelerated, pushing out smaller operations and
independent outfits, what was a worker or consumer to do? Where could
one go?

Private Equity Vet [[link removed]] keeps a running
list and map of corporate- or private-equity-owned vets around the
world. By the latest count, there are over 12,000
[[link removed]] such outfits in the United
States and Canada, and over 2,000 in the UK — and the list is
growing. Stateside Mars [[link removed]] alone owns over 2,000
practices across three brand names (with another 128 north of the
border), while in Canada Berkshire Partners controls 375 under the Vet
Strategy brand, the largest of a handful of operators in the country.
The Private Equity Vet numbers suggest that as much as 75 percent of
the veterinary market in the US and Canada is corporate- or
private-equity-owned.

Helpless and blameless pets — who can’t count to one, let alone
understand what private equity is — will suffer or die.

The costs of consolidated, corporatized, or private-equity-controlled
vet services add up fast. As per the iron law of monopoly and
oligopoly, concentration in the market tends to produce higher prices
and poorer service. Without countervailing and competing options, it
will become harder and harder to find a veterinary clinic whose prices
and standards aren’t set by a handful of corporate owners, the
former high and the latter low. That’s likely to mean not only high
costs for visits and procedures but also lower pay for workers, scant
benefits, and diminished working conditions.

As wretched as the PE capture of an industry can be, the takeover of
vet services is particularly disconcerting because of the nature of
what vets do: they care for animals, usually pets whose owners are
very fond of them or, at the very least, don’t wish to see the
creatures suffer. This dynamic creates highly inelastic demand such
that pet owners will be stuck paying inflated prices and receiving
poorer service because they refuse to see the animals they consider
part of their family descend into poor health and misery. So,
they’ll pay. Or, worse, in extreme cases they won’t because,
despite desperation and devotion, they’re unable to, and their
helpless and blameless pets — who can’t count to one, let alone
understand what private equity is — will suffer or die.

Breaking Out of Our Cages

Far from inevitable, the flow of private equity into every last crack
and crevice in the economy is a political choice by governments
captured both by the stories we tell ourselves about the “free
market” and by the capitalists who keep them alive through networks
of influence and class alignment.

As capital accumulates in the hands of the few and inequality grows,
it becomes easier for PE to consolidate its hold over entire
industries and expand into new ones. The result is a cycle of growing
inequality and shrinking competition, and suffering among the
many — the vast majority of us — who remain on the outside
looking in while both literally and figuratively paying the price.

Dismantling the private equity apparatus across industries requires a
public-policy solution; changing the way consumers spend their money
won’t do it. You can’t leverage consumer choice in a rigged
system. If we are to inhabit a capitalist world for the time being,
governments ought to be able to insist that it abides by its own
purported rules. That means preventing PE from consolidating entire
sectors of the economy and wielding its market power to extract profit
from workers and consumers alike.

Such a system would be better for workers, consumers, and, in the case
of veterinary medicine services, the pets we care for and love.

These reforms require a fight, but it’s one worth taking on. And if
we won’t do it for ourselves, we ought to at least do it for the
creatures that we love and care for as family. As Nicole Aschoff has
put it in these pages, we need to ban
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private equity.

_David Moscrop is a writer and political commentator. He hosts the
podcast __Open to Debate__ and is the author of __Too Dumb For
Democracy? Why We Make Bad Political Decisions and How We Can Make
Better Ones__._

* Veterinary Practice
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* private equity
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* animal rights
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