Recently two United States Senators penned a letter to the senior leadership at  Mars Petcare to begin an inquiry into monopolistic practices that Mars related business may be involved in.  M&Ms and Snickers aside, Mars and in turn, Mars Petcare owns Blue Pearl Animal Hospitals along with the entire VCA chain of clinics and all of the Banfield Pet Hospitals. In total, Mars Petcare owns approximately 3000 veterinary clinics around the world. And while they have been under the watchful eye of regulators dating back to 2017, how this impacts all of us is now a hot topic of pet owners and veterinarians alike.  Social media feeds blow up with irate veterinarians and their beloved technicians, disgruntled at the state of wages, increased workload and corporate muscle calling all the shots.  But as a pet owner, how are you affected? Let’s take a look.

At its most basic function, veterinary medicine is the practice that we rely on to treat sick pets. Domesticated animals are part of our family and when they are sick we rely on our entrusted veterinarians. We can easily and quickly become desperate to find care. All of our sensibilities go out the window while we frantically look for immediate help for our ailing pet. Access can be difficult to schedule and expensive to pay for.  Add a profit driven operator into the equation and you have the perfect storm of customer demand and profitability meeting head to head.  

At Pets After Dark we are an independent  business that realizes the value of partners both independent and corporate.  We are not anti-corporate or anti-business.  We are a veterinary service bringing a little daylight to a problematic and widespread condition affecting all of us; more hospitals, less veterinarians. Increasing the number of physical  hospital locations while at the same time not increasing veterinarians to staff them does not make the problem better it actually makes it worse. There are almost 87 (1) million households that have pets in the USA with a combined total of over 111 (1) million dogs and cats. These pets are being served by the approximate 126K veterinarians practicing veterinary medicine in the US. Let’s do that math. Every veterinarian has to see 880 unique pets a year. Assuming most pet owners go to the veterinarian 2.5 times annually, the net has each veterinarian seeing over 2200 patient visits annually. Then add in any specialty issues and that number increases drastically. It is the perfect storm.

According to the AVMA , there are between 28,000-32,000 veterinary clinics in the USA.  And PetDesk states the average cost to go to veterinary school is $275,000 for a four year program. It’s very hard to get into veterinary school and it costs a lot of money, potentially causing new veterinarians to begin their career carrying a lot of student loan debt. This is compounded if there is also undergraduate debt.  This means people are not lining up to go to vet school and in turn there are less veterinarians entering the system.  So as long as there are more veterinary hospitals than there are vets to properly staff them, the system will remain stressed, the prices will be high and the wait times to see a doctor will be off the charts. This in turn causes stress and forces you to spend a lot of money in order to receive appropriate care for your sick pet. This is the current state of affairs.

A recent exchange on a popular (private for veterinarians) Facebook group Not One More Vet there was a thread discussing closures in the Banfield chain for many under-performers. The commentary stated  that anywhere between a few and all of the Banfield locations would close. At the time of this writing, we have no first hand knowledge of this, only multiple second hand accounts and quite a bit of chatter. That old saying,  “where there’s smoke…there’s fire” , can’t help but make us wonder. 

“I relief for 1 in Illinois and was told 18 are closing. I’m not sure how many urgent cares”

“Corporate urgent care came post pandemic as another quick money maker at a time where private smaller practices GP couldn’t handle anymore and the ER was overwhelmed with all the really non major ER cases. Not to mention the cost to go to the ER for all the more minor things that should be handled by their GP. Our industry is such a mess.”

“It seems that Mars is doing some downsizing. Although it has been rumored for a while, the Banfields in Petsmart are closing in our area.”

“I recently did a relief shift at one and was told it’s all of them except for some older ones in California and Arizona.”

The veterinary community is very much in touch with how closures affect everyone.  It stands to tax a system already over burdened. If you have ever been in a vet clinic, you know there are a lot of people working there.  According to recent data from the AVMA, the ideal employee to veterinarian ratio in a veterinary clinic is around 5:1, meaning for every full-time equivalent veterinarian, there should be approximately five other full-time equivalent staff members supporting them, including veterinary technicians and assistants;  this ratio is considered most efficient for maximizing productivity and revenue per veterinarian. That’s expensive!

 Working as veterinarian requires an unencumbered mindset to be successful. It can’t be clouded by money or metrics. Back when I first had a pet in the late 80’s, I remember Dr. Larry Gerson seeing my pet and not charging for a visit. That happened often back then. I think part of it was our shared a love of SCUBA diving. Then I heard he did it with others …that didn’t dive. 😂  Those days, long gone, remind us of a time where all that mattered was getting the pet on a road to recovery. And getting paid was a bonus!

We regularly hear stories from clients that had excessively long waits at the ER (4-12 hours)  that ended with a huge bill. We have also heard about clients having difficulty getting in to see their veterinarian in a timely fashion. Veterinary medicine should not be that way!  Hopefully with the adaptation of Pets After Dark pet owners can benefit. We have already started to  do our part to fix this problem.  PAD users, either Subscribers or Single Consultation clients have benefited from our service. Perhaps they saved a trip to the ER, (that happens a lot with us). Or we booked the client a next day appointment with their own veterinarian. By partnering with veterinary clinics around the city we can start to decongest their schedules. We are able to limit unnecessary trips to the ER. By making care recommendations at night  and on weekends we help to stave off a medical crisis. And by giving clinics a heads up about one of their clients that needs to be seen,  it allows their efficiency to improve dramatically. All of these mechanisms working through our network are the first small steps to helping you save both time and money and most of all, the health and well being of your pets.

We can’t speak to the whether or not Mars Petcare is a predatory business. It is not our place to say.  What we can say is that treating pets requires compassion, time, knowledge and expertise gathered by experience. 


Stay tuned for Part 2

By Dr. Caroline Simard and Howard Swimmer
Founders, Pets After Dark

1) Pet Ownership Statistics 2025, Forbes Magazine , Jan. 2, 2025