One crisp Sunday afternoon in late February, Louise Taylor noticed that one of her family’s two pet rabbits, Honey, couldn’t stand up properly. “We got an appointment at the emergency vet and they gave her painkillers and drugs,” says Taylor, a 46-year-old civil servant. “But she still couldn’t stand. The vet said he thought she should stay in overnight, and it would cost £900, or we could take her home, and it would be £200. It didn’t feel like much of a choice.” She believes it was presented as: you have to, if you care about your rabbit.
Thinking back on it now, Taylor says the family, which did not have pet insurance, had been prepared to be pragmatic. “She was eight and a half years old; that’s quite old for a rabbit. They tend to live eight to 10 years. But we did what the vet said.”
The next day, the practice, which had recently been bought by one of the big six corporate chains that own 60% of the UK’s vets, called to say that Honey wasn’t improving and should probably spend another night in “intensive care”. She was discharged the following morning, but when Taylor took Honey back to the family home in London, she was a shadow of her former self – “really dozy and rapidly deteriorating” – and Taylor went back to the vet to have her put to sleep. “Really, I think that would have been the best outcome at the first appointment,” Taylor says. “But we kept her alive for another week, at a cost of more than £1,200. I find it hard to know how it could have cost that much.”
The Taylors are not alone in finding vet bills increasingly expensive, or in wondering if the ever more complex treatments being suggested are in their pets’ best interests. Everyone seems to have a story: £3,000 for blood tests for a lethargic cat; £2,000 to have a jack russell’s broken tooth removed; £400 to bandage a rabbit’s dislocated toe. Others complain of routinely being sold drugs at several times what they cost online.
Choosing a vet for Lemony, an eight-year-old brown and white beagle/spaniel cross, was a “no-brainer” for Nicky Baker, 40, who works for the Advertising Standards Authority and lives in London. “There is a vet on our road, 10 doors down,” she says. But she now wonders if she should have done more research after adopting Lemony (full name: Lemoniake), a rescue dog from Cyprus, seven years ago.
“The vet checked her over and was very nice and it was reasonably priced,” Baker says. “But fast forward a few years and everything is very expensive and we keep thinking we’re being upsold.”
First, the vet practice said Lemony would have to have her teeth professionally cleaned: “And to do so she’d have to be sedated and that will be £500, please.” Baker said she and her husband regularly brushed Lemony’s teeth without incident, and refused the professional cleaning. “But I left feeling bad, like I wasn’t doing the best for her.” Next, at her annual checkup, the vet said Lemony had a heart murmur. “It was news to us,” Baker says. “The vet said it could be serious, but that they’re really good at open-heart surgery for dogs now.” The cost was estimated at £2,000-£4,000. Again, Baker declined the treatment.
Then, a couple of weeks ago, Lemony ate half a pack of sultanas and, as every dog lover knows, grapes, raisins and chocolate can be poisonous for dogs. The vet gave Lemony an injection (£150) designed to make her vomit up the sultanas. It didn’t work. They then offered a second injection, to counteract the nausea (£150). “The vet said she should stay in overnight and be monitored; it would cost £500.” Baker declined both the new injection and the admission, saying they could watch her at home. “We asked what changes we should look out for and the vet said she ‘might look a bit pale’. I wanted to laugh – she is a predominantly white dog.”
The next day Lemony did “the most humongous poo” of the sultanas and has been “absolutely fine ever since”.
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Everyone – vets included – agrees that costs have soared in recent years. But it’s hard to figure out by exactly how much, as eight in 10 vet practices do not display prices on their websites. When the Competition and Markets Authority invited pet owners to raise concerns about the £2bn industry last autumn, an “unprecedented” 56,000 people responded, leading the regulator to launch a formal investigation into “multiple concerns” about possible market abuses.
Until a change in the law in 1999, only qualified veterinary surgeons could own vet clinics. This meant most practices were small businesses run by partners who knew their patients and played an important role in the community, just as in the cosy 1980s TV series All Creatures Great and Small. In the last few decades, though, big businesses have been buying up practices at a furious pace, drawn by their often healthy profit margins, which could be increased by consolidating services under a big corporate umbrella. Vets are also regarded as “recession-proof”, as Britons will cut back on just about everything else to prioritise their pets.
In 2013 about 10% of vet practices were owned by six large corporations; now 60% are. But the march of the “big six” corporations has gone unnoticed by many pet owners as four out of six practices keep the name and branding of the previous independent business. In the majority of cases they also keep on the existing vets, giving the former owners new titles such as clinical director (and, often, a lottery winner-sized cheque).
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Gez, an energetic academic in her late 50s, with a silver bob and black-rimmed glasses, has been going to the same vet on the outskirts of Glasgow for 24 years. She has taken dozens of pets – dogs, cats and hens – to the practice and they “always received excellent, kind, affordable care. Then it was taken over by My Family Vets and not only have prices rocketed, but she believes the day-to-day care of the pets has not been as good.
“The main vets are still wonderful,” says Gez, who doesn’t want to give her surname because of the closeness of her community, “but the costs have well and truly gone up.” She has also noticed what she perceives to be a “pushy corporate culture”. “Last year when I took our 12-year-old cat, Tillie, for a vaccination and checkup, I had barely put down her basket before the hard sell started. I was offered a very expensive ‘full checkup’, rather like private healthcare checks for humans.”
The pushiness continued throughout the visit, she says, with a leaflet detailing dental work Tillie needed, at a cost of £800. “There was a tone indicating that I would be somehow neglecting my cat if I refused.” Now, she says, going to the vet “can feel like going to a sausage factory that sees each pet as pound signs rather than individual animals. I’m fortunate, I can afford to care for my animals. But I’m blowed if I’ll grease the wheels of invisible owners.” A spokesperson for the company declined to discuss individual cases, but said the business “is committed to providing customers with a wide range of high-quality care and treatment options”. They added that their vets “do not recommend unnecessary treatment or diagnostics”.
Squint at the small print on the My Family Vets website – “a nationwide network of local veterinary practices, supporting pet owners and their local communities” – and you will find it is part of Independent Vetcare Ltd, which owns 1,074 GP-style first opinion practices (FOPs) in the UK – that’s more than one in five of all FOPs in the country. Its latest accounts show it added 35 practices over the year, on top of 60 the previous year. It is actively looking to buy up more, with a chunk of its corporate website given over to encouraging vets to “sell your clinic … so you can focus on being a veterinarian again”.
As well as the vet practices, IVC owns 38 “referral sites” for specialist diagnosis (digital radiography, CT scans, MRIs, ultrasound, endoscopy) and treatment centres (including operating theatres, intensive care and rehabilitation units), centres for behavioural issues, out-of-hours emergency services, online pharmacies and six crematoriums. Its turnover in the latest annual figures was almost £1bn, a 12% rise on the previous year.
Independent Vetcare is part of the even bigger IVC Evidensia, which since it was founded in 2011 has grown to more than 2,200 clinics, hospitals and out-of-hours sites across 19 countries. The company, whose headquarters is inside a former Cadbury’s factory near Bristol, is valued at almost £11bn. That’s more than the market value of Sainsbury’s and Marks & Spencer combined, and if IVC Evidensia were listed on the London stock market it would probably be in the top 50 biggest companies in the UK. But it isn’t listed. It is owned by Swiss food giant Nestlé; Silver Lake, the Silicon Valley private equity firm famous for investing in Skype, Airbnb and Twitter; and private equity firm EQT, which is part-owned by a Chilean billionaire.
IVC Evidensia is the biggest of the big six vet groups in the UK. The others include Pets at Home, the pet supermarket, which owns 447 practices; and CVS Group, which owns more than 500, a string of diagnostic laboratories and seven pet crematoriums. Medivet, which owns the practice used by the Taylors (and did not respond to a request for comment), has 383 FOP vets and 27 emergency night vets in the UK. In 2023, LGT Capital Partners, the $100bn investment fund of “the Princely Family of Liechtenstein”, the low-tax principality sandwiched between Austria and Switzerland, bought a stake in it, alongside a couple more private equity funds.
VetPartners, another private equity-owned group, has more than 500 sites, two veterinary nursing schools, laboratories, a locum agency, online pharmacy vetuk.co.uk and 14 pet crematorium sites. Finally, Mars, the American conglomerate famous for the chocolate bar, owns 168 vet practices and 17 referral hospitals in the UK via its Linnaeus subsidiary. Mars owns more than 2,500 vet clinics or hospitals around the world, and more than 40 pet food brands including Pedigree, Whiskas, Cesar, Sheba and Royal Canin.
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Ruth Armstrong’s husband took their elderly black labrador, Blackmore, to the vet after he had a seizure. They suspected it might be time for him to be put to sleep. The vet advised further investigation: there was an MRI scan, blood tests and a metabolic investigation. The bill came to more than £7,000.
Blackmore was discharged on medication Armstrong says he could not tolerate, and “without a clear management plan”. Back at the family’s home near Ely, Cambridgeshire, Blackmore suffered another seizure a couple of weeks later, and Armstrong bundled him into the back seat of her car and drove to the vet. “The seizure continued all the way, and he was put to sleep in the back of my car. It was very traumatic as he was the most wonderful dog and didn’t deserve to die like that.”
Armstrong, 54 and a doctor, who also owns several horses, says she was not given the option of allowing Blackmore to be put to sleep at the first appointment. She believes many owners would rather see pets relieved of their suffering than have vets throw everything at them to extend their lives a little longer.
She estimates vet bills have gone up 300% in the past eight years. “We scrutinised the bill and compared it with prices online, but it was hard to see how the figures were derived and they appeared to be hugely inflated,” she says. “For example, £49 for a spoonful of paracetamol suspension.” In one case, the vet charged for “a phone conversation, even though I couldn’t hear what he was saying”.
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It is the lack of transparency around prices and ownership of vet practices that riles Beverley Cuddy, editor of Dogs Today magazine, and her readers. Cuddy, who has a “lifelong dog obsession”, says the proudest moment of her life was delivering to 10 Downing Street a 100,000-signature petition for a new law to regulate puppy farms. She says dogs and their owners “need their own Greta Thunberg” to highlight the many issues facing the four‑legged, adding, “Until there is a Greta, I’m happy to stand in.
“Going to the vet has become a game of Monopoly – the big guys are buying everything up, but you don’t really realise who owns a practice until you land on it and get the bill,” says Cuddy, who has edited Dogs Today since its launch 34 years ago. “The result is much less choice and higher prices.
We love vets – they are the ones that feel the ire of pet owners, but it’s not them doing it, it’s the corporate owners. Now they are wage slaves who have to spend half the appointment upselling.”
Cuddy has witnessed the change first-hand, when her local “maverick, independent” vet in Surrey was bought by a corporate chain. “He had saved my dog, Oscar, who had a lot of complicated rare diseases, at least twice by just trying something. Now it’s a chain, they have to follow all the procedures, and with a dog with rare diseases, if you went through all the protocols it would be dead before you got to the end of it – but they would have made a lot of money in tests.”
Oscar, a tricolour bearded collie, lived a “long, wonderful life”, despite suffering Addison’s disease. Then one night he looked deep into Cuddy’s eyes: “I looked back at him and said, ‘You’ve had enough boy, haven’t you?’ I wanted to end his suffering right then, so we found the nearest night vet, which was owned by one of the big six, and drove there. I was prepared for it being expensive, but not for the way the card machine was held in one hand and the needle in the other.”
Cuddy says she “had to fight to stay in the room with him as he died. He was old and blind, and I wanted him to know he was safe.” Almost as soon as he had slipped away, the vet pressed a brochure into Cuddy’s hands and said, “We use these people for cremation – do you want it to be personal or mixed?”
“I looked at the brochure and thought: that looks all right, and said yes to the individual cremation.” She had paid by credit card, but didn’t look at the bill until the next morning. “It was incredibly expensive – more than £1,000 to put a dog to sleep.” It turned out that the crematorium was owned by the same company as the emergency vet.
“I’m the editor of a dog magazine, and I like to think I’m pretty savvy,” Cuddy says. “What happens if you haven’t got a credit card with £1,000 on it? Or if you turn up with a dog you’ve run over?”
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On qualification, every vet in the country must swear a declaration promising: “Above all, my constant endeavour will be to ensure the health and welfare of animals committed to my care.” Robin Hargreaves, a semi-retired vet from the village of Trawden in Lancashire, can still remember taking the oath 35 years ago, after graduating from the University of Liverpool School of Veterinary Science. “It’s an amazing moment that makes my hair stand on end,” says Hargreaves, an avuncular 61-year-old who takes his time speaking to make sure less vet-literate listeners understand him. “If nothing else, becoming a vet makes you interesting at parties: we kill things, we keep things alive. It’s all the awful smells, and the blood and guts.”
To answer Cuddy’s question he says, “Yes, if someone hits a dog with their car and brings it in, of course I’ll see it – it is our duty. But would all the big chains? I’m not sure. They would have to ask the management.”
Suzanna Hudson-Cooke, 33, works as an emergency night vet at a corporate-owned practice in Kent. The hours are long and the work highly stressful as “you are meeting people who are in a real crisis and relying on you”. Working there has made her a big fan of pet insurance. “When owners say they have insurance, it’s a sigh of relief. It means we won’t bear the brunt of their anger over the cost of treatment,” she says, the morning after a 13-hour night shift. “We vets don’t have any influence over the pricing structure, so if they’re insured, I can at least do my job.”
Hudson-Cooke owns a three-legged rescue cat called Marmalade, whose annual insurance costs about £320 and will pay out up to £15,000 a year in the event of a crisis: “I am a self-confessed ‘crazy cat lady’ and I wanted him to have gold-standard care.” The usual premium for a cat is about £125 but pet insurance costs are also on the rise. The average in 2022 (the latest year available) was £327, according to the Association of British Insurers. That’s a 21% increase on the 2020 figure. Premiums have risen, it says, because claims have risen to a record £872m a year.
Hudson-Cooke, who is also the branch chair of the British Veterinary Union (BVU), says the corporatisation of vets has made an already highly stressful profession more difficult for many of the BVU’s members, which include vets, nurses and support staff. “They are realising that the employer doesn’t necessarily have their best interests at heart.”
She says most vets’ complaints are about punishingly long (often unpaid) hours, and where the buck stops. “We are governed by the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons (RCVS) and if something goes wrong, the vet or nurse can be struck off. But we don’t make the decisions about not accepting patients whose owners can’t pay, or when the practice closes. If an emergency patient comes in at 6.45pm but the practice closes at 7pm, do you accept it and work overtime for free, or apologise and explain that you can’t help, and turn the patient away and it dies?”
Hudson-Cooke says vet operators should also be subject to regulation, just as the Care Quality Commission monitors human healthcare providers. “People think it must be wonderful to be a vet, being surrounded by animals all day,” she says. “And, don’t get me wrong, lots of it is wonderful. But it is also very stressful: there can be a crisis every 15 minutes, people coming in in real distress, and it is your responsibility.” It results in a high dropout rate, with about 45% of vets who leave the RCVS register doing so four years after they qualified. “There’s also a huge mental health crisis, and we have one of the highest suicide rates of any profession in the country.”
People who believe they have lost pets because of vets’ mistakes have joined together to form support groups on Facebook. Often they launch salvoes on the RCVS’s official Facebook page, describing the alleged error, in often harrowing detail. Recently, one retired vet, Tim Mainland, wrote back, “Every complaint, spurious or not, takes a massive toll and destroys already fragile mental health. You target these comments at a tiny number of bad situations. But they are off target. Writing it here means that every vet in the land feels the hurt.”
Linda Joyce-Jones, 59, a retired NHS healthcare assistant living in north Wales, is well known in the Facebook support groups and has often posted on the RCVS page. “It was vet-bashing,” she admits. “I was grieving and lashing out, but I learned that the fault is with the system. It’s not the world of All Creatures Great and Small any more – practices have been taken over by corporate greed, and the vets themselves are as much the victims.”
Joyce-Jones’s black and white rescue cat Rosa died in 2018 after – she claims – being potentially misdiagnosed with feline immunodeficiency virus (a condition similar to HIV) by one of the big chain vets. “My world just fell apart. Rosa was so traumatised and skittish when I first got her that it took years to gain her trust, but then she never left my side and would follow me around the village.”
She says that after Rosa died she felt she had to do something to give other local pet owners an alternative to corporate vets. So she set up her own clinic – Rosa’s Mobile Vets – in the back of a silver Ford Transit van. “We’ve transformed it into a real clinic,” she says, showing me around the van. “There’s a fridge for drugs, a table for examinations and a crate to transport animals.”
It’s not quite the retirement she had planned – weaving on a loom, crocheting and watercolour painting will have to wait a few years as she will be driving the van across the winding roads of Anglesey offering care to pets that need it. Joyce-Jones isn’t a vet, so won’t be providing the care, but the 1999 law change means she can be the owner of the practice. Her vet will be Salman Nazir Bou Assy, a Ukrainian refugee whose family were housed at a nearby Welsh seaside holiday park soon after Russia’s invasion. Nazir Bou Assy, who studied veterinary medicine in Ukraine and Lebanon, plans to start at Rosa’s later this year after graduating from a master’s course at the University of Liverpool’s School of Veterinary Science.
It’s a huge gamble: Joyce-Jones has remortgaged her house to pay for the transformation of the van and Nazir Bou Assy’s wages. “We’ll be on the road by the summer, come what may,” she says.
The Taylors’ house in London is – just a little – out of Joyce-Jones’s catchment area, but Taylor says she will definitely seek out a genuinely independent vet in future. But it may not be for a while. “Jazz, Honey’s brother, is very sad and lonely. He really misses her, as rabbits should be kept in pairs,” Taylor says. “We might try to find someone with rabbits to take him, so Jazz can have companionship and go there for his final years.”
