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In India, faith does not lower its voice. It rings bells before dawn. It burns incense at street corners. It spills into traffic and interrupts schedules without apology. Here, belief is not something you carry discreetly. It is something you live visibly, publicly, and often without explanation. To the visitor, this can at first feel overwhelming. And then, slowly, it feels instructive. A Majority Faith That Isn’t Quiet Hinduism is not just one belief system among many in In

In India, you are not hosted. You are absorbed. There is a subtle but important difference: Hosting  implies a boundary: a start time, an end time, a sense that you will eventually leave and life will resume its usual shape.   Absorption  has no such courtesy. Once you cross the threshold of an Indian home, you are inside the organism. You are family now. Whether you asked to be or not. The Guest Is God The phrase Atithi Devo Bhava - the guest is God  - is often translated p

You can admire food from a distance. You cannot do that with water. Water enters you quietly. It slips past intention and habit, past years of unthinking trust. In India, water is never neutral. It is watched, boiled, filtered, carried, bartered, worshiped, feared. It is life - and it is risk. You learn this not from a warning sign, but from the pause before you brush your teeth. Water Is Everywhere & It’s Rarely Innocent In much of the world, water is invisible infrastructur

Before you travel in India, you must learn how  to eat. Not what  to eat - that comes later - but how . Slowly. Deliberately. With respect. With restraint. And with an understanding that food in India is not merely nourishment, but culture, religion, family, and ritual layered onto a plate. India teaches this lesson early. Sometimes forcefully. The First Truth: India Is Generous With Food Food in India is everywhere. It arrives uninvited. It is pressed upon you. It is shared

In Part 1 , I argued that we need to bring the same level of scrutiny to veterinary continuing education (CE) that human medicine has applied to its own system, especially around corporate influence. But even if we solved the funding problem tomorrow, we’d still be left with a deeper issue: Our regulatory systems treat time spent in a chair as a proxy for competence. Even if a participant sleeps through all the lectures! You know the drill: I need 20 hours this year.   I’m sh

Picture two wolves in the veterinary profession. One is Greed . Not always snarling, often well-dressed. It speaks in polished phrases: efficiency , synergy , standardization , scale , shareholder value . It doesn’t announce itself as predation. It arrives as a spreadsheet. The other is   Care . The old, stubborn animal in us. Compassion , craft , continuity . A vet who knows the patient, the client, the staff member’s kid’s name, the way a frightened dog leans into a particu

We drove into Van Horn, Texas,  as we have done once a year for the past eleven years and sat down for dinner in the dining room of the El Capitan Hotel . Built in 1930, El Capitan still carries itself with the quiet dignity of another era. The food is excellent, the wine list carefully chosen, the service warm and unhurried. For us, the El Capitan has become a ritual. Proof that some things endure when care, community, and craftsmanship are valued. Just north of this little

One of the more curious rebuttals to any critique of corporate influence in veterinary medicine is the phrase: You’ve never worked in a corporate practice, so your opinion doesn’t count. It’s a silencing tactic. A way of shrinking the conversation to those already within the system, and by extension, ensuring that dissenting voices remain unheard. But this argument collapses under the simplest scrutiny. You don’t need to have drawn a corporate paycheck to understand the ethic

In the high desert of New Mexico, where sunlight paints the mesas in gold and red, a simple yet powerful image radiates across the landscape. The Zia Sun Symbol . To many, The symbol is instantly recognizable from the New Mexico state flag: a red sun with four groups of four rays extending outward on a golden field. But to the Zia Pueblo , this symbol carries a far deeper meaning rooted in spirituality, harmony, and respect for the natural order of life. Origins in the Zia Pu

Last Sunday morning, I noticed her in the church yard of the San Albino Basilica in Mesilla, New Mexico, 30 miles from the border. A delicate, black, lace mantilla draped over her head and shoulders, almost blending with her hair. The mantilla has long been a symbol of faith, femininity, and tradition across Spain and Latin America. In Mexico, has its own unique identity. A blend of Catholic devotion, indigenous artistry, and social expression. The mantilla’s roots reach bac

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 meaning of those words has shifted. To illustrate this point, I w

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