The Number Of Local, Independent Vets Is Shrinking Fast — And It Shows

In late 2024, just six companies own 60% of UK vet practices. If this were a game of Monopoly, we’d begin to worry about losing the game.

Anna H

Independent veterinary practices accounted for 89% of the UK industry in 2013, this share fell to less than half (45%) by 2021. That’s scary, and it explains many things I’ve experienced in the past couple of years with my huskies.

We need veterinary care to remain independent and local to offer our non-human family members the best lives possible, no matter what. Otherwise, as with every industry, the more concentrated a market becomes, the worse the service/output becomes.

Photo by Werzk Luuuuuuu on Unsplash

Market consolidation in pet health has been going on for some time now. A deeper look at what’s behind this figure begins to uncover the unsavoury truth- some companies gobbling up veterinary care practices have, at first glance, mostly very little to do with the industry they’re buying up. Some are confectionary giants, some are private equity heavy hitters with diverse portfolios.

For example, Mars is one of the companies that has been an active gobbler for a while. Yes, Mars. Whose main original USP is providing us with chocolate bars and other confectionary. They began by buying the pet food company behind “Chappie” in 1935, then expanded into cat food that same decade. Then in 1965, they opened a research center in the UK to research feline nutrition needs. They continued acquiring pet-related businesses for the next few decades — for example, Royal Canin in 2002.

Their first foray into end-to-end pet health was in 1994 in the US, where they invested in Banfield Pet Hospital. These guys are the biggest veterinary practice in North America.

Mars has also bought up quite a lot of the UK market. One of my huskies was referred in late 2023 to Northdowns, a big referral-only animal hospital in the British countryside. Whilst I was doing their paperwork, in the small print on the consent forms, I clocked that Mars owned them. When I mentioned my surprise to the neurologist seeing us, the poor guy looked bewildered, shrugged as if he had given up on life, and said, “That’s the way it’s all going right now, sadly. It is what it is”.

At that point, I was wondering if Mars did that to create some sort of “end to end”/ “lifecycle” portfolio — you get your pet, feed it Mars food. Inevitably, your pet will, at some point or other, need to visit the vet. Mars is now there, too. If they manage to save your companion, they have a pet food client for a little longer. Rinse repeat.

What worries me here is that, given the many degrees of separation between pet health and end-of-year financial statements, Mars (and many others) very likely seeks to implement very tough financial controls and targets that eventually compromise pet health. There have been cases where if any (brave) vets have gone against corporate objectives, they’ve been ousted from their franchise. There are even class action lawsuits happening as we speak. Check out this link here for just one case.

There are also countless accounts on Reddit and other platforms where employees openly warn pet owners to be careful about the motivations of their practices and the level of service they provide. And not just around Banfield — there are tons and tons of warnings about many non-independent veterinary centers across the US and the UK. I’m not saying here that vets and veterinary nurses are evil by any means, but they have their hands tied if they want to keep earning a wage.

A further example of questionable market consolidation and control is Vets Now. Vets Now are emergency vets in the UK, currently owned by IVC Evidensia. Vets Now used to be independent, but they were then purchased by IVC Evidensia (owned by yet another company) in 2018. In early 2023, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) here in the UK was questioning the impact of this deal across most regions in the UK. Its’ previous owners profess that Vets Now would remain independent, but that seems very doubtful. During the few visits I’ve made to Vets Now, they were a lot more focused on the money side of things than on the pet patient side of things — the first thing they do is ask you to pay, even before your poorly animal has even seen someone to begin diagnosis. Outrageously, in my own case, another husky of mine was very critically sick in the kennels, and they wouldn’t treat her until the kennel owner paid for the initial concentration. I get that they’re a business, but there’s a time and a place — that wasn’t it, and the kennel owner didn’t have to feel obliged to either pay or watch my dog die.

I don’t think it’s the callousness of the individual employees involved, as I mentioned above — it’s likely a consequence of target setting and who ultimately owns these practices. Those targets are also a plausible explanation for why the price of veterinary services has skyrocketed during the same period that the market has become more concentrated. Here’s how it looks in the US:

Everybody knows that healthcare, both for animals and humans, is expensive. However, the constant price hikes only make the problem worse, as customers like you or I then end up correlating higher prices with better services and outcomes — which aren’t guaranteed.

This comes through loud and clear in both customer and employee reviews.

For UK vet practices owned by the big 6, a substantial number of reviews on Glassdoor comment on how the company (and its owners) just cares about money and not animals. Their staff seem very unhappy and quote corporate objectives diverging from ethical goals around animal care time and time again.

Generally speaking, the average Glassdoor scores across the top 6 vet practice owner groups as of February 2025 aren’t great. They stand at a tiny fraction above 3 out of 5:

• IVC Evidensia’s Glassdoor review score is a woeful 2.5 out of 5
• Vetpartners’s score and CVS Group’s are a bit better at 3.5 and 3.4, but management is cited as toxic in a lot of recent reviews.
• Medivet’s Glassdoor review average is 2.7
• Linnaeus-Group (Mars) scores 3.3, but their current CEO approval rate is shockingly low (33%).

Sure, there are lots of industries where low reviews exist, and these platforms are more likely to attract employees with grievances than not. However, the details of these reviews are interesting and tie up with a lot of customer reviews on platforms like Google and Trustpilot that aren’t 4* or 5* stars (which I won’t get into today).

Back to Glassdoor reviews a second — looking through the Glassdoor reviews, it didn’t surprise me to spot a theme around the employers’ disregard for animal welfare. One employee review from Medivet says:

“…Medivet also criminally price their products. Indorex (flea spray) is sold for £45 in Medivet, yet on Amazon, it is only £15. Do not work for this terrible company, and do not risk bringing your pets here either, as all they care about is extracting as much money out of you, the customer, as possible. Profit comes before pet care at Medivet…”

Looking at their ownership data, it turns out that Medivet is owned by multiple companies, one of which is a private equity firm. Having worked in the City for 7 years before moving over to Telecommunications and then Automotive, I can tell you that I don’t think PE firms care as much about your pet as you do. So those kinds of reviews aren’t really surprising — but yet it still hits home when you see how that translates when you need veterinary care for your animal. There are quite a few stories out in the press about pets going into emergency care, contracting far worse things than what they came in with, and then their humans being forced to fork out insane sums for conditions they did not present originally. You can also see this in the customer reviews, which, in the cases where the reviews posted aren’t positive, are honestly quite upsetting to read.

My own experience here made me realise just how more money-driven than ethics-driven some processes seem to be (again, I don’t think it’s the vets, per se) — I had one vet tell me that I needed to decide whether to refer or euthanise my very sick soul dog just a few hours after my dog was admitted. He said he needed to leave by 8.30 am, and that would leave no other choice available other than euthanasia according to standard practice. He also then added, very seriously, that euthanising would at least lower my vet bills.

Not only is this highly inappropriate, but this was after having only 1 blood test done, which is nowhere near determining the root cause of any problem.

Once we urgently moved my soul dog over to a different veterinary hospital to diagnose her condition, and she sadly died, during the same phone call with the news of her passing, the vet said “…But we can perform an autopsy free of charge for you”. Again, this might be standard protocol, but it is an extremely inappropriately timed comment that shows whatever process was being followed has an utter lack of care for both the poor animal and the owner who just got such terrible news. That could have been saved for later. Given the hospital was also a research facility, then the “why” of the comment was obvious, even in the state I was in. My exact thoughts were: “You just want to do this for your own research, not for my own piece of mind. You consider my dog a test subject”.

And that’s not on either of the vets I mentioned above; it’s just a symptom of the processes and targets enforced by the company that has purchased them.

Reflecting on this a year later, I still wonder whether the emergency vet would have given me a time limit on deciding on my pets’ care if his practice was still local and privately owned. You can’t know for sure, but if the pressure is on from HQ, then it stands to reason that loyalties won’t lie with the customer.

There have also been cases where processes put in place push vets to also favour pushing specific pharmaceuticals because their companies have been incentives via funding — see for example: reuters.com/article/markets/commodities/special-report-vets-face-conflicting-loyalties-to-animals-farmers-and-drug-fi-idUSL1N0U60Y2

I’m not saying vets are bad people — at all. I’m saying that the companies that own them have very different aims and targets than what vets traditionally set out to achieve — so there’s an ethical conflict of sorts emerging. It’s difficult to stand up to this as a vet, as you could lose your job — and then what? You become unemployable and can’t switch professions easily?

For us pet owners, it’s a very difficult situation. One we don’t have much control over. It’s also the same story for vets and veterinary nurses themselves — even though a large number of them may be opposed to some practices/processes, then unless there’s enough of them feeling like they have nothing to lose, there’s very limited meaningful change that can take place — Mars isn’t just going to divest in the veterinary side of their portfolio just because some vets have shown they’re unhappy with the way things are done, right?

So what can we do? Not a lot right now, our best bet is to ask better questions and not be rushed into decisions we may live to regret. Do research, calmly, to formulate good questions. Only pick practices that take the time to listen and answer (and even then, beware of diverging interests!). Then, use the answers to these questions to take the best actions you can that you KNOW align with your own ethics.

Fonte: deep.sweet.pub