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Where care meets capital. A handshake across opaque glass. In veterinary medicine, ownership has long implied responsibility. To call a hospital privately owned once meant that veterinarians - those directly accountable to patients and clients - owned and governed their own workplaces. The phrase carried a sense of professional integrity and continuity. Clients could trust that decisions about their pets were guided by clinicians, not by external investors. Today, the meanin

I went to Istanbul to talk about old dogs’ brains and came home thinking mostly about cats. Back in May 2002, Hill’s Pet Nutrition put together a European speaker tour on Neurological Problems of Old Dogs . Seven talks, each about ninety minutes long, marching across the map: Lisbon, Madrid, Barcelona, Istanbul, Toulouse, Paris, and beyond. At the time, Hill’s had just launched a new therapeutic diet, Prescription Diet b/d , the first commercial food designed specifically to

If you pick up the program for almost any major veterinary conference, you’ll see two things very quickly: A long list of talks that qualify for CE hours, and   A dense forest of corporate logos. We’ve grown so used to this that it barely registers. It goes without saying that pharma, pet-food, diagnostics and corporate practice groups support our education. Of course , we sit through sponsored dinners and branded webinars to earn our hours. But who really owns our continuing

Across nine essays we’ve followed a pattern that has become impossible to ignore: How a profession built on compassion has been quietly re-engineered into a financial product. From the Marvel analogy  in Part 1 - where the Juggernaut of corporate greed gained its strength from the gem of private equity - to the global tour that took us through Australia ,  Europe ,  North America , and  the emerging markets of Asia ,  Africa , and  South America ,  each chapter has mapped a d

Walk into a clinic in Shanghai, São Paulo or Nairobi and the story still looks familiar:the smell of disinfectant, a nervous dog on the scales, a vet with a name badge rather than a corporate lanyard. But, increasingly, the money behind the scenes is changing. In Europe, Australia, and North America, we already know the script: Independent practices pulled into chains, chains sold to private-equity funds or conglomerates, prices and pressure quietly rising. Parts of Asia, Afr

Walk into a clinic in Denver, Toronto or Des Moines and it still feels local . A hand-written note on the whiteboard, a well-worn coffee mug on the desk, a vet who remembers your dog’s first vaccine. But follow the ownership trail and that local practice may now be part of a chain backed by global confectionery money, New York private equity funds, or a Luxembourg investment vehicle most clients have never heard of. As in Europe, this isn’t a simple story of good clinics vers

Looking up the ownership structure of your local vet clinic in Europe may be complicated . It's likely that your clinic is part of a sprawling European portfolio, controlled not by the people working in the building, but by private equity funds in London, Stockholm and New York, or by global conglomerates whose real business is pet food, junk food for people, and financial engineering. Just as in Australia [ see Corporate Greed (Part 4) in this series ], this is less a tale o

In earlier parts of this series about corporate greed, I’ve argued that the rapid consolidation of veterinary practices into large corporate groups and private equity structures is reshaping our profession, for better and for worse. I’ve raised concerns about transparency of ownership, pressure on clinical autonomy, and the way return-on-investment expectations can shape decision making in the consult room. A reply to the following blog post from someone who’s worked on the c

Walk into many Australian veterinary clinics in 2025 and the signage still whispers family practice : familiar names, smiling vets on the wall, the reassuring language of local care . Look behind the logo, though, and you often find something else entirely. A global private-equity fund in Stockholm, New York, Sydney or Toronto, quietly extracting returns from the love Australians have for their animals. This is not a morality play about good and bad ownership. It is a caution

Veterinary medicine, once a calling driven by compassio n, community , and a deep sense of duty to animal welfare , is facing a quiet but growing crisis. A crisis rooted in corporate greed . Over the past two decades, a wave of consolidation has transformed the profession. Small, independently owned veterinary clinics are being swallowed up by private equity firms and large corporations. The consequences, for pets, their owners, and the professionals who care for them, are be

(Part 1 of Canine Brains, Human Profits was published in November 2025 here: https://www.ricklecouteur.com/post/canine-brains-human-profits-part-1-toward-fair-collaboration-in-neuro-oncology-455 ) Veterinary neurosurgery now sits at a crossroads where clinical care , comparative oncology , and commercial innovation increasingly overlap. Laser interstitial thermal therapy, high-frequency electroporation, and systemic mRNA platforms are no longer theoretical tools. They are b

Every year, tens of thousands of veterinarians file into convention centers, hotel ballrooms, and exhibition halls to fulfill their CE requirements. We trust that what we hear in those rooms is guided by science, not sales. We assume that topics are chosen because they’re important for animal health, and that speakers are selected for their expertise, not for their logo affiliations. But here’s the uncomfortable surprise I ran into when I went looking for hard data on this to

If you’re caring for a toddler in 2025, there’s a good chance a cheerful woman in pink overalls has already moved into your living room. Most people meet Miss Rachel on a screen - singing, signing, and narrating her way through letters, numbers, and first words. But lately, many parents are meeting her in a different place: on the bookshelf. With titles like Ms. Rachel and the Special Surprise  and 100 First Words , she’s now a bona fide children’s book author as well as a g

On November 30, 2022, OpenAI quietly released what it called a research preview   of a conversational AI system. The instructions were modest; internally, staff were told not to treat it like a product launch. The rest of the world didn’t get the memo. Within weeks, that low-key experiment – ChatGPT - had become the fastest-growing consumer app in history, crossing 100 million users in about two months. But what is ChatGPT? Is it a search engine with better manners? A glorif

George Orwell  gave us a useful little word for a very modern problem: Doublethink . The ability to hold two conflicting ideas in your head at the same time, and to believe both. In Orwell’s 1984  it sounded extreme: “2 + 2 = 5” and “2 + 2 = 4” living side by side in the same brain. Today, we don’t have a 1984 Ministry of Truth , but we do have something more polite and better dressed: University leaders who are expected to be wholly dedicated to the public good, while also s

How are you to imagine anything if the images are always provided for you? Assimilate. Ubiquitous. Everywhere all the time. That little string of thoughts could almost be a lost footnote from George Orwell’s 1984 . George Orwell coined the word doublethink  to describe a terrifying mental gymnastic: The ability to hold two contradictory beliefs at the same time and to accept both as true. It wasn’t a bug in his dystopian society; it was a feature. If the Party said 2 + 2 = 5,

When Malala Yousafzai walked onto the stage at the Mondavi Center on November 18, 2025, UC Davis wrapped itself in the language of moral courage. The Chancellor’s Colloquium billed the evening as a conversation between a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and UC Davis Chancellor Gary S. May, celebrating a woman who risked her life to speak out against injustice. But outside the glow of the Mondavi Center, the huge entertainment center at UC Davis, a different reality hangs over the c

On burrito nights, I don’t really cook. I drive to a small restaurant, stand in line with everyone else, and order dinner in foil and paper. Burritos for home. For a long time, that was the whole story. Then I started noticing a man who spends most evenings on the sidewalk nearby. Homeless? Unhomed? I still fumble for the right word. Labels never feel big enough for a whole human life. He sits with a backpack, sometimes with a plastic bag of belongings, sometimes with nothing

If you wanted to explain Roger Federer to someone who has never watched a tennis match, you could start with a single, startling piece of math. Over a 25-year career, Federer played 1,526 singles matches and won 1,251 of them - a towering 82% win rate , one of the best in the history of the sport. He collected 20 Grand Slam singles titles and 103 career titles along the way. And yet, in those same matches, he won only 54% of all the points he played  That tension - dominance

In both settings, the veterinary resident is in the middle of a quiet crisis. But the shape   of that crisis, and the forces driving it, look different in a university teaching hospital than in a private specialist practice. Think of them as two parallel worlds with the same young clinician at the center, pulled by different kinds of gravity. Who is the Resident? In a university teaching hospital.   The resident is, officially, a learner  and a teacher .   Patients and client