Corporate Greed (Part 3): Can Vet Med Still Change Course? (#452)

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. It is whether we can still influence how it unfolds and who pays the price.

Tipping Points: When Normal Becomes Irreversible

In the climate world, a tipping point is a threshold beyond which a system begins to change rapidly and irreversibly. Ice sheets that, once destabilized, continue to melt. Forests that, once sufficiently degraded, shift to savannah.

Before the threshold, course correction is difficult but possible.

Afterward, we are largely managing consequences, not preventing them.

Corporate ownership in veterinary medicine is following a similar trajectory.

For decades, veterinary practice was dominated by independent or small partnership models. Consolidation began slowly. One practice here. A regional group there. Until private equity and large conglomerates recognized veterinary hospitals as a stable, cash-generating asset class. Then, the roll-up began in earnest.

Today, in many regions:

• Large corporate chains and private-equity–backed platforms control a substantial proportion of general, emergency, and specialty practices.

• Young veterinarians often graduate into a landscape where corporate employment is the default, not the exception.

• Training, internships, and residencies are progressively intertwined with corporate networks and their funding streams.

At some point, a system like this crosses its own tipping point:

• When corporate ownership reaches a critical mass in a city or region, independent clinics lose negotiating power, referral networks narrow, and exit options shrink.

• When debt-fueled acquisitions set new market norms for purchase prices, the next generation of independent buyers can no longer afford to compete.

• When the profession’s culture is shaped largely inside corporate structures, the very idea of an alternative model starts to feel quaint.

Like climate tipping points, these changes are rarely announced with fanfare.

One day, we simply look up and realize that going back to the old equilibrium is no longer realistic.

The challenge is no longer to stop corporatization,

but to prevent a fully financialized monopoly on animal care.

Externalities: Who Bears the Hidden Costs?

Climate change is, at its core, a story of externalities. For more than a century, fossil-fuel profits were privatized while the costs (heatwaves, floods, crop loss, displacement) were socialized and delayed. Carbon dioxide was a waste product dumped into a shared atmospheric common for free.

Corporate veterinary medicine produces its own externalities, less visible but no less real.

At the point of acquisition, corporate buyers and selling practice owners reap immediate financial rewards. Investors receive dividends and capital gains.

But the downstream costs are pushed elsewhere:

• Pet owners experience higher prices, confusing fee structures, and increasing pressure to accept large gold standard treatment plans, even when their financial reality is fragile.

• Veterinarians and nurses absorb moral stress as they navigate production targets, standardized protocols, and performance metrics that may conflict with their clinical judgement.

  
  

Burnout, compassion fatigue, and attrition are the emotional pollution

of the system.

• Communities lose independent clinics that once functioned as stable, locally accountable institutions. Decisions about staffing, pricing, and investment are now made in distant boardrooms.

On corporate balance sheets, these costs do not appear.

They are externalities, borne by clients who delay care, by staff who silently leave the profession, and by animals whose treatment options are constrained by financial engineering rather than medical reasoning.

Just as with climate, the core ethical problem is not merely that profit exists. It is that those who benefit most are structurally insulated from the harms they help to create.

Lock-In: Debt, Infrastructure, and the Difficulty of Turning Around

Climate scientists describe carbon lock-in. Once a society has built highways, gas networks, and power plants designed around fossil fuels, shifting to a low-carbon system becomes harder and more expensive. The existing infrastructure and sunk costs resist change.

Veterinary medicine is developing a similar lock-in:

• Practices are purchased with substantial leverage; servicing that debt requires aggressive revenue growth.

• Corporate IT systems, booking platforms, and diagnostic networks tie clinics into proprietary ecosystems that are difficult to exit.

• Non-compete clauses and restrictive covenants bind individual veterinarians to corporate employers and constrain the growth of new, independent practices in the same catchment area.

The result is a kind of structural inertia.

Even clinicians and managers who would like to practice differently feel trapped inside a machine whose primary purpose is to maintain cash flow and investor returns.

The system pushes inexorably toward higher average transaction values, tighter scheduling, and upselling, much as a fossil-fueled economy keeps pushing toward higher output.

Lock-in does not mean change is impossible.

But it does mean that simply exhorting individuals to do better

is inadequate.

Systemic problems demand systemic solutions.

Towards a Just Transition for a Caring Profession

In climate policy, a just transition refers to moving away from high-carbon industries in a way that is fair to workers and communities. Coal miners and oil workers are not blamed for the system they inherited. They are seen as partners who deserve support, retraining, and dignified alternatives as the economy decarbonizes.

Veterinary medicine needs its own version of a just transition.

If we accept that the current, highly leveraged corporate model is unsustainable (ethically, economically, or both), then the goal cannot simply be to tear it down and walk away. Too many animals, clients, and professionals now depend on corporately owned hospitals for care and employment.

A just transition for veterinary medicine would ask:

• How do we protect clinicians and nurses from being collateral damage as ownership structures evolve?

• How can we diversify models of practice ownership (e.g., co-operatives, employee-owned clinics, regional alliances of independents), while maintaining access to advanced diagnostics and emergency care?

• What regulatory and professional frameworks are needed to ensure transparency of ownership, limit predatory non-compete clauses, and enforce ethical standards around pricing and conflicts of interest?

• How do veterinary schools and professional bodies re-assert their role in shaping professional identity, so that corporate culture does not become the sole template for what normal practice looks like?

This is not a romantic call to return to a bygone era of sole practitioners in converted houses.

It is an argument that any transition away from the current juggernaut must explicitly protect the wellbeing of animals, clients, and veterinary teams, not just the interests of investors.

Mitigation and Adaptation: Two Kinds of Action

Climate policy distinguishes between mitigation (reducing emissions to limit future warming) and adaptation (adjusting to the warming that is already inevitable).

Veterinary medicine can borrow the same conceptual toolkit.

• Mitigation.

  
  

  • In this context, this means slowing or reshaping the financialization of the profession:

    
    

    • Strengthening ownership-disclosure laws so clients can see clearly who profits from their clinic bills.

      
      

    • Capping or scrutinizing certain fees and mark-ups where market power is clearly being abused.

      
      

    • Encouraging competition by supporting new independent practices and innovative non-corporate networks.

• Adaptation

• This acknowledges that corporates are already deeply embedded:

• Training veterinarians to recognize and manage conflicts between production metrics and patient care.

• Providing wellbeing and advocacy structures for staff within large organizations.

• Helping clients navigate a complex landscape of insurance, payment plans, and second opinions.

Both are necessary.

Only mitigating the problem leaves today’s clinicians struggling inside existing systems.

Only adapting to it concedes the future entirely to corporate finance.

What Tipping Point Do We Aim For?

In climate discussions we sometimes talk, cautiously, about positive tipping points. These are moments when adoption of clean technologies or new norms becomes self-reinforcing in the right direction.

Veterinary medicine needs its own positive tipping points:

• When disclosure of ownership becomes standard and expected, opacity itself becomes a reputational risk.

• When enough veterinarians refuse egregious non-compete clauses, employers must change their contracts to recruit talent.

• When clients consistently reward transparent, community-oriented practices, whether corporate or independent, business models that rely purely on extraction become less attractive.

None of this will happen accidentally. It requires deliberate action from regulators, professional bodies, educators, practitioners, and informed pet owners. But it is still within the realm of the possible.

Conclusion: Shared Planet, Shared Profession

The climate crisis and the corporatization of veterinary medicine are not identical problems, but they share a moral structure:

• Powerful actors reap concentrated benefits in the short term.

• Costs are dispersed, delayed, and pushed onto those with less power:

• Future generations in the case of climate.

• Ordinary clients and clinicians in the case of veterinary care.

• Narratives of inevitability (“this is just progress”) are used to justify inaction.

The language of tipping points, externalities, just transition, mitigation, and adaptation reminds us of two things:

• We are already late.

• Much of the damage to the planet and to the profession cannot be undone.

  
  

• We are not powerless.

• The slope of the curve, the distribution of burdens, and the space we preserve for integrity and care are still very much in play.

The task now is not to indulge in nostalgia for a simpler past, but to insist that the future of veterinary medicine, like the future of the climate, be shaped consciously, transparently, and justly.

The juggernaut is moving.

Whether it crushes or carries us depends on the choices we make from here.

#bunyipsbooksbeyond