Quick Take

What a Documentary About Cats Taught Me About Private Equity

September 25, 2026

When a pair of documentary filmmakers asked to interview me for the film New York Cat Crisis, I initially hesitated. The UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights clearly impose a responsibility on businesses to avoid impairing the human right to health or impeding access to medical care. But at least for now, human rights law has little directly to say about businesses raising barriers to pet care.

At the same time, private equity (PE) and other acquirers are following the same playbook to roll up clinics and raise prices whether the clinics are medical or veterinary. Antitrust regulators around the world make no distinction between the two phenomena, and use the same legal strategies to combat them. At the level of families and neighborhoods, soaring pet care prices (along with the general rise in the cost of living) are forcing people who can no longer afford vets to abandon sick pets at alarming rates. Even if the problem is poorly captured by human rights law, it’s a heart-rending one—and it certainly doesn’t enhance private equity’s popularity. In the end, I agreed to participate in New York Cat Crisis, playing this fall at select New York theaters. The more I study the issue, the gladder I am that I did.

The Roll-Up Playbook

Private equity has poured well over $50 billion into US veterinary care since 2017. Corporate consolidators—including many non-PE players—account for more than a quarter of general and three-quarters of specialty veterinary practices in the US. The UK has seen similar trends, with six corporate groups (three of them private equity) now controlling 60% of the British veterinary market, with larger positions in local submarkets.

Veterinary prices rose at nearly twice the rate of inflation in the US over the past six years, as they did in the UK from 2016 through 2023. Rising veterinary prices are less buffered than rising medical prices, because the rate of uninsurance among American people (tragically 8 percent, and on its way up again) is vastly lower than the rate of uninsured American pets (96 percent). Moreover, there’s no such thing as a “safety-net” animal hospital, mandated by law to accept all comers. One result, as the film shows, is an explosion of stray cat colonies in every borough of New York City. (The dog crisis presents differently, because dogs are more commonly surrendered than abandoned).

Antitrust Steps In

Antitrust policy is well-suited to address the problem, as both U.S. political parties still strive to some degree to ensure fair competition, regardless of how society values the goods or services being provided. The first Trump Federal Trade Commission (FTC) forced two corporate acquirers of veterinary clinics (controlled respectively by the private conglomerate Mars Inc. and the family-controlled private equity vehicle JAB Consumer Partners) to divest a smattering of clinics as a condition of completing their mergers, to avoid market dominance in particular cities. The Biden FTC went a step further. To greenlight a separate 2022 pet care acquisition by JAB, it not only ordered divestments, but required prior approval of any future takeovers in certain urban areas.

The UK Goes Further

This March, the UK Competition and Markets Authority completed a more systematic investigation of its pet care market. It concluded that the six leading acquirers had distorted competition and attributed the excessive rise in UK pet care prices to the rapid consolidation of the veterinary market. The UK’s remedies were more systematic too. Veterinary practices must clearly signal if they are corporate-owned, with signs on their premises and online. They must cap their prescription fees, post a full price list, give a written estimate for any treatment costing over £500, and create a complaints process.

This summer, the UK Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs followed up by proposing legislation that both agencies urge Parliament to enact during its 2026-27 session. The proposed reforms to the Veterinary Services Act would for the first time regulate veterinary businesses (as opposed to vets). The bill would create a 12-person regulatory board for veterinary businesses, as well as a Veterinary Ombudsman to handle consumer complaints. Funded by a small proportionate tax on veterinary firms, the new board would enforce the antitrust remedies announced in March.

What About the U.S.?

The UK model offers a potential new way forward for U.S. state legislatures, which are starting to pay attention to the issue, but have mainly considered adapting reforms aimed at consolidation in the medical sector. Most notably, Colorado has strengthened the review of transactions to acquire veterinary practices, and New York has debated doing the same. North Carolina is the most recent state to debate tighter restrictions on the “Corporate Practice of Veterinary Medicine.”

What Regulators Are Missing

My main takeaway from viewing New York Cat Crisis is that UK regulators have overlooked the animal welfare and community dimensions of the problem. Wherever the cost of living is rising (which is almost everywhere), households living at the edge are agonizing over giving up their pets, abandoned pets are suffering, and neighborhoods are struggling with consequences as unmistakable as the stink of cat urine in an alleyway. If New York City is any indication, cities overwhelmed with urgent needs are severely underfunding rescue and spay/neuter services, while desperate volunteers stick their fingers in the dike. Even the most effective antitrust remedies for one well-targeted industry can only partly allay the problem. We would urge the UK Parliament, and any legislature that follows its lead, to allot some of the proceeds of a new fee on veterinary businesses to local pet rescue and spay/neuter services. Absent this type of legislation, we would advise corporate pet care consolidators, including those that rely on private equity, to subsidize pet rescue services, as a gesture of good will to their communities, as a way to discourage overbroad regulation, and as a means to preserving their social license to operate.

Values-Based Investing