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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

When your dog is vomiting at 2 a.m. or your cat suddenly stops eating, you aren’t thinking about private equity, holding companies, or corporate structures. You’re thinking about trust . You want a veterinarian who listens, explains, and puts your pet ahead of profit. But behind the friendly faces at the front desk, the ownership of veterinary hospitals has changed dramatically. In many countries, a growing share of clinics are now owned or funded by large corporations and pr

In the past few months, three papers using dogs as models for brain tumor research have landed on my desk, and they’ve been hard to stop thinking about. The first , by John Rossmeisl and colleagues, explores how high-frequency irreversible electroporation (H-FIRE) reshapes tumor-derived extracellular vesicles and nudges the brain’s immune landscape. https://www.scilit.com/publications/4f97ed7da675ba231c52663a0d387ed9 The second , led by Sheila Carrera-Justiz, reports a system

The ginkgo leaf holds two distinct lobes on a single stem. You can think of one lobe as the independent practice  and the other as the corporate practice . They look separate, even pull in slightly different directions, but they’re joined at the same base: the veterinary profession’s oath to relieve suffering, protect animal welfare, and serve the bond between people and their animals. Hold the leaf up to the light and you see those veins radiating out like a river delta. Tha

There is a Ginkgo tree at the end of my street .... In summer it is almost forgettable. Just another green shape among poles and power lines. But in late autumn it does something extraordinary. Overnight, the leaves turn a clear, unwavering yellow, and then, sometimes in a single windy day, they let go. The footpath becomes a carpet of fan-shaped coins, as if someone had spilled a jar of sunlight at the cul-de-sac. Standing there with a rake in my hand, it’s easy to think thi

In climate science, we talk about tipping points , externalities , and a just transition . These are not just abstract terms for melting ice sheets and coal plants. They are also a remarkably accurate vocabulary for what is happening to veterinary medicine in 2025. Veterinary care, like the climate, is being reshaped by powerful economic forces that gather momentum quietly and then suddenly feel unstoppable. The question in both arenas is no longer whether change is occurring

There were two paintings in my childhood home that felt less like decoration and more like members of the family. One hung above my father’s desk: The Macquarie River near Dubbo, NSW by Colin Parker , painted in the early 1960s. The other watched over my mother’s room: Through Winter Trees  by Colleen Parker , dated 1984, and purchased by my mother after my father’s death. For decades I thought of them simply as Dad’s painting  and Mum’s painting . Two separate choices, two