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One day in 2024, Justin Laudadio found his cat, Chicken, writhing on the floor of his home in Feasterville, Pennsylvania, apparently in the midst of a seizure. Laudadio put Chicken in a carrier and raced to a veterinary hospital, preemptively grieving the whole way.
The veterinarians were able to stabilize Chicken, a brown tabby who was about 12 years old and diabetic, during a three-day hospital stay. Though he was diagnosed with acromegaly, a hormonal disorder caused by a benign pituitary gland tumor, it never became entirely clear what caused the seizure.
But one thing was very clear: Chicken’s care was going to be costly. Even before extra testing that would add thousands of dollars, the bill was $9,500. It was an eye-watering figure, but Laudadio and his wife, Airy, agreed to cover it before they even knew whether Chicken would make it. “You do what you have to do,” Justin said.
“The biggest struggle in access to care is certainly the cost of it,” said Donald Consla, a veterinarian at Animal Friends, a Pittsburgh animal shelter with a low-cost veterinary clinic.
Since 2017, veterinary prices have increased about 67%, much faster than overall consumer prices, which rose about 38% during the same time period, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
“Veterinary medicine has had a big transformation in the last decades,” said Jennifer Quammen, president of the American Veterinary Medical Association. Pet owners now have access to technologies such as MRI and ultrasound that “at one point [were] found in human hospitals only,” she added. “That equipment certainly comes with a cost.”
Higher operating expenses, pharmaceutical prices and general inflation are also contributing to bigger bills, Quammen said.
Pet owners may be responding: Vet visits have declined over the past year even as industry revenues increased, according to the veterinary association. “We are seeing people delay routine care, preventive care,” Quammen said.
The low-cost Pittsburgh clinic has seen greater demand for its services in recent years, Consla said, as more owners sought out affordable vaccinations and wellness exams.
While it’s hard to compare the business model of a low-cost clinic with that of a typical private practice, Consla said, he has seen some extraordinary prices quoted by other veterinarians. “Some of the estimates people come in with are truly wild,” he said.
Private equity and your pet
For most of the industry’s history, the vast majority of veterinary practices were small and independently owned. Today the landscape is increasingly shaped by large veterinary groups backed by private equity and corporations such as Mars Veterinary Health, controlled by the wealthy family behind Mars candy. (Chicken was treated at two Mars-owned BluePearl hospitals.)
National Veterinary Associates, owned by the investment firm JAB Holding Co., has more than 1,000 veterinary hospitals in the United States and Canada. Many of them kept their original local names, making their corporate ownership less obvious.
Corporate ownership of vet practices has grown rapidly in recent years, from 11% of the sector in 2017 to about 30% in 2024, according to Brakke Consulting. It’s much higher among specialty and emergency clinics, 75% to 80% of which are owned by corporate and private equity groups. Such clinics together with corporate-owned primary care practices account for roughly half the industry’s revenue.
Veterinary care is appealing to investors for several reasons. It’s easy to consolidate fragmented pet care markets, for example, and pet owners typically pay for services out of pocket rather than relying on insurance companies with more power to contest prices. But perhaps the most important factor is demand: If a pet owner can afford to pay for the care a vet recommends for an animal they consider part of their family, they will.
While it’s not clear whether corporate- and private-equity-backed practices are uniformly charging more than independent vets in the United States, a recent investigation by the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority found that five large veterinary groups charged on average about 18% more than independent practices.
U.S. regulators have worked to limit the market power of large veterinary groups in recent years. During the Biden administration, the Federal Trade Commission required the private equity firm JAB to divest several specialty vet clinics as a condition of its more than billion-dollar acquisitions of two veterinary groups, a move regulators said would prevent the firm from “gobbling up competitors in regional markets that are already concentrated.”
The cost of companionship
Ongoing research by Lauren Powell, an assistant professor of animal welfare and behavior at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Veterinary Medicine, shows low-income people report strong attachment to their animals — sometimes stronger than that of other income groups. As a result, they “will do everything they can within their means sometimes to try and find ways to access veterinary care,” she said. And sometimes they will exceed their means.
The Philadelphia Animal Welfare Society is a shelter committed to doing all it can to keep people of limited means with their pets, offering low-cost care, free pet food and even temporary foster home placements for animals whose owners are experiencing homelessness or other hardships. Philadelphia is a high-poverty city where many people “are living paycheck to paycheck, and the [choice] between feeding themselves and their pets is a reality,” said Cory Topel, the communications and grants manager at PAWS. She said pet owners will sometimes go hungry themselves to afford food for their animals.
PAWS will never turn anyone away for lack of funds, Topel said. “If you turn them away, then they’re in a situation where they can no longer afford to keep their pet,” she said. That only forces owners to surrender their pets to a shelter or, worse, “Tie them to a bench or let them run free.”
Other organizations aim to intervene before the cost of care forces difficult choices. The Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, nonprofit For the Love of Alex raises money to help low-income pet owners across the country pay for necessary vet care.
Daisy, a dog from Pennsylvania, was one such pet. Daisy escaped during a walk earlier this year and eventually found her way home with a broken leg and tail; a vet believed she had been hit by a car. Daisy’s owner covered the cost of her hospitalization with CareCredit, a credit card for health and wellness expenses, including pet care.
But Daisy needed a leg amputation that wasn’t approved for financing. For the Love of Alex covered the remaining cost, more than $7,000.
“Owning a pet has become dramatically expensive,” said the group’s executive director, Carla Isenberg.
Isenberg, a former veterinary technician, said emergency vet bills amounting to several thousand dollars used to be unusual. But in fielding requests for help lately, she has noticed big differences in prices between smaller, “mom-and-pop” clinics and those owned by corporate chains.
The high-priced care Chicken received after his seizure led to a happy result. He is “thriving” today, his owners said, living the standard snoozing life of a senior cat. His health has improved with the help of specialized food and daily medication, a “luxury” that Justin and Airy feel lucky to be able to afford.
Airy said she now wonders whether the low life expectancy of cats with acromegaly is “because of the disease or because the [cost of the] treatment is so prohibitive for so many people.” If Chicken had fallen ill a few years earlier — before Airy and Justin were married and both had stable jobs — the calculus might have been different. They may have faced what Justin called a “heartbreaking choice.”
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