Private equity is reshaping Asheville’s vet clinics: ‘They’re circling me like a vulture’ • Asheville Watchdog
A new query seems to come every day. An email pings in Otto Sharp’s inbox, or the phone rings at Swannanoa Valley Animal Hospital, and though the company on the other end may change, the gist is always the same: Ever thought about selling?
“They’re circling me like a vulture,” Sharp said recently.
But Sharp, who came to Asheville in 1999, has been around long enough to have his own bird’s-eye view of the veterinary landscape. When he bought Swannanoa Valley in 2005, independent ownership was still the norm for local vet hospitals. Then came a steady creep of corporatization that exploded around the turn of this decade.
An Asheville Watchdog analysis of state veterinary records found that more than half of Buncombe County’s brick-and-mortar small-animal clinics and hospitals are now owned by large corporations, including all three emergency animal hospitals.
Corporate conglomerates have enticed local veterinarians to sell their practices by paying far over market price and outmatched independent vets with perks and benefits they could not afford – signing bonuses, payoff of student loan debt, and higher salaries, multiple vets told The Watchdog.
Private equity firms latched onto veterinary businesses as more people owned pets and considered them family members, willing to do — and pay — anything to keep them alive. But the shift has come at a cost: higher burnout among vets in corporate practices, higher prices for consumers.
Buncombe vet practices by ownership
// Map by Karsten Ivey of KarBel Multimedia, based on Asheville Watchdog’s analysis of North Carolina veterinary records and public information from vet chains and private equity firms
Jeff Johansson, owner of the independent Beacon Veterinary Hospital, said he’s seen costs for major surgeries such as repairing a stomach twist increase to as much as $10,000, from about $700 in the early 2000s. “I just can’t explain that based on inflation,” he said.
“Obviously private equity is going to be profit-motivated, and so decisions are going to be made based on profit targets and goals,” he said. “Our decision making is more, ‘How do we survive?’ not, ‘How do I get my next Lamborghini?’”
Pet owners told The Watchdog that they’ve left or considered leaving longtime vets, disillusioned by changes in cost or care in the wake of sales. Independent vets say the private-practice sector feels increasingly precarious. And though the corporatization of veterinary medicine has decelerated from its frenetic pace earlier this decade, private-equity backed firms continue to seek to grow their market share.
Swannanoa Valley, which employs five vets, is among the area’s largest independents left standing, which Sharp knows makes it an appetizing prospect for his cold-callers. A couple of years ago, he decided to humor them; he let representatives from three corporations visit his practice to evaluate it — “just to see what they would say.”
“They wanted to throw money at me,” Sharp said, “but they were going to totally change everything. And I said, ‘Nope.’”
Dr. Otto Sharp neuters a golden retriever at Swannanoa Valley Animal Hospital on a busy Wednesday morning. Swannanoa Valley employs five doctors and is among the area’s largest independents left standing, which Sharp, the owner, knows makes it an appetizing prospect for corporations. // Watchdog photo by Katie Linsky Shaw
Corporate consolidation has been a factor in the vet industry since at least the late 1980s, when Veterinary Centers of America began buying independent practices; Banfield Pet Hospital, which operates the clinics inside PetSmart stores, got into the game soon after. (Both VCA and Banfield are now owned by Mars Inc., which is the country’s largest vet-care provider but is better known for making Snickers, M&M’S, and a slew of other candies.)
In 2010, about one in 10 American vet practices were corporately owned, said Michael Fenne, a senior policy coordinator for the nonprofit Private Equity Stakeholder Project, or PESP. That number soared over the following decade as private equity firms moved into the sector, acquiring “platform companies” — such as National Veterinary Associates, Mission Pet Health, and PetVet Care Centers — that buy and consolidate independent practices.
Those investments made them well poised to expand, especially as pandemic-era adoption rates juiced pet-related industries. Between 2017 and 2023, The Atlantic reported, private equity firms spent more than $50 billion on the vet sector. By 2023, according to the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, corporate vets accounted for half of the industry’s domestic revenue. A 2025 report by the Ackerman Group, a brokerage that specializes in sales of vet practices to corporations, counted more than 35 companies “rapidly changing the face of the veterinary services industry,” most backed by private equity.
The Watchdog reached out to more than a dozen corporate consolidators and private equity firms involved in the vet industry. A spokesperson declined comment on behalf of Veterinary Practice Partners, whose network of clinics co-owned with vets includes two local facilities, and its backer, Audax Private Equity. None of the rest responded.
Veterinarian Morgan Frye, with help from veterinary assistant Kaela Ammons, examines Joan Francz’s puppy, Miles, at Partners Animal Hospital Asheville. “People really love their pets, and I think the mindset has really shifted a lot from them being a pet to more of a family member now, too,” said Frye, the clinic’s owner. “So because there’s that desire to do everything we can, to keep them healthy and alive for as long as possible, private equity is able to capitalize on what we are willing to invest in our pets’ health.” // Watchdog photo by Katie Linsky Shaw
Several factors make the vet industry appealing to private equity, perhaps none more than pet owners’ willingness to pay tremendous amounts of money to keep their animals alive and well. The Harris Poll’s 2024 “State of Pets” report found that more than 80 percent of pet owners described pets as being like their own children. That attachment is particularly pronounced among younger generations, as are the financial implications: In the same poll, 60 percent of Gen Z and millennial pet owners said they prioritize spending on their animals over themselves, and half of Gen Z respondents said they’d shave a year off their own life in return for an extra year with their pets.
“People really love their pets, and I think the mindset has really shifted a lot from them being a pet to more of a family member now, too,” said Morgan Frye, a vet and owner of Partners Animal Hospital Asheville. “So because there’s that desire to do everything we can, to keep them healthy and alive for as long as possible, private equity is able to capitalize on what we are willing to invest in our pets’ health.”
Those trends dovetail with financial features appealing to investors. Clients at vet clinics pay the full cost of treatment, and at least some of it is often charged up front. Analyses of the 2008 financial crisis have suggested that the industry is unusually resilient to economic downturns. Rising vet costs have long outpaced inflation: As of February, vet service costs were up 5.3 percent year-over-year, compared to 2.4 percent overall, according to the Consumer Price Index. A 2025 report from the private equity fundraiser Capstone Partners noted that even as the pet industry has cooled, “fundamental growth drivers, such as pet humanization and favorable demographic trends, have contributed to consistent spending growth and an optimistic mid- to long-term Pet sector outlook.”
Experts have also pointed to lax regulations on the vet industry. Though the Federal Trade Commission has taken occasional steps to limit consolidation by Mars and the private equity firm JAB Holding Company, it has shown little interest in the sector under the second Trump administration.
“We see places with lower regulation seeing a lot more private equity activity — being able to roll up (practices) and avoid antitrust issues,” said Matt Parr, a communications director for the PESP. “There’s not as much regulation and oversight in the veterinary industry as there is, say, in human healthcare.”
A decade ago, most of the corporate practices now operating in Buncombe County either didn’t exist or were owned by local veterinarians. The shift began in the late 2010s, around the same time private equity firms began investing in the pet industry in earnest. In late 2017, state records show, Charlotte Street Animal Hospital’s vet-owner sold it to a large consolidator; after a merger, it’s now part of Mission Pet Health, which counts four Asheville-area practices among its 850-plus locations. Two months later, Animal Hospital of North Asheville’s founders — locals who had been in business for 40 years — sold it to a group owned by PetVet Care Centers, which has more than 400 clinics.
Over the next few years, vet corporations expanded their local footprints through both acquisition and expansion. In 2019, a newly launched startup called Family Vet Group bought Redwood Animal Hospital, which it later renamed East Asheville Family Vet. Over the next two years, it established two new practices, West Asheville Family Vet and Carolina Family Vet. In 2022, the startup — which by then employed 40 veterinarians across five states — was bought by Heartland Veterinary Partners, a private equity-owned consolidator with more than 300 locations.
Within a few years, corporate entities owned all three of the county’s emergency animal hospitals.
Amy Marshall and Autumn Stubblefield refer to their West Asheville backyard as The Farm, an allusion to the ever-present buzz of animal activity. Along with an English mastiff, Ramona Lisa, there are three cats — Whip, Hazel, and Pearl — who dart in and out of the house; a pair of chickens, Frances and Stevie, who reside in a temperature-controlled “condo”; and their roommate, Thor, a 23-year-old African tortoise.
For families like theirs, routine care costs can accumulate to eye-watering sums. Marshall recently estimated that they’d spent more than $10,000 on vet bills since the beginning of last year. The top line item was one she saw as non-negotiable: a life-saving, early-morning emergency hysterectomy for Ramona Lisa, who was suffering from pyometra, a deadly infection of the uterus. It totaled $6,700 at MedVet Asheville, the local outpost of a national chain of emergency vet hospitals.
Though the cost was steep, Marshall said she was “thrilled with the care.” Other vet visits have inspired less confidence. When Ramona Lisa had a bleeding skin tag, Marshall took her to West Asheville Family Vet, where the family’s animals have been established for years. She recalled a vet there telling her that the only solution was surgery, which would have cost $1,800 and required the 8-year-old dog to undergo anesthesia, and that she’d have to consent right away — otherwise, the office would be booked for months.
“That was a hard sell,” she said. “I was very turned off.”
Even the cost of routine care has outpaced her expectations. Earlier this year, she took one of the cats, Whip, to West Asheville Family Vet to make sure a change in a thyroid medication dose was having the intended effect. She expected to pay $50 to $75; her bill came to nearly $300, she said, about half for the blood work and the rest for a general vet-visit charge.
After that appointment, Marshall moved Whip to another practice, Asheville Cat Clinic, and paid for another round of blood work and another vet visit.
Jessica Bristow, the practice manager for West Asheville Family Vet, said the practice would not comment on specific cases but added that “our team makes recommendations based on each pet’s individual needs, with a focus on their health and safety.”
“We also prioritize clear communication about care plans, follow-up appointments, timing, and costs so clients can make informed decisions,” Bristow said. “Our team is proud to care for a large and loyal client base, many of whom have trusted us with their pets for years. When concerns are raised, we take them seriously and use them as an opportunity to listen and improve.”
Vet care costs have climbed across the board, not just at corporate practices, but there’s evidence to suggest that corporatization has contributed to the trend. A survey of nearly 900 vets, published in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association in 2023, found that vets at corporate practices felt more pressure than their independent counterparts to see more clients per shift. While a majority of private-practice vets said they felt little or no pressure to generate revenue for their employer, only about a third of corporate-practice vets answered the same way.
Consolidators often posit that their way of doing business results in a better product for the consumer, with access to more vets, more specialty care and more equipment at more hours.
That argument doesn’t always square with clients’ experiences. Last year, a Waynesville pet owner named Mary Hansen filed a state veterinary complaint against South Asheville Veterinary Emergency & Specialty after she said her pug, Pearl, died when the hospital failed to treat a foreign body lodged in Pearl’s neck. Though Hansen’s regular vet had referred Pearl to SAVES because of its ability to perform an endoscopy and a CAT scan, Hansen said the hospital told her it was too short-staffed to manage those tasks. Instead, it sent Pearl home, where she died the next morning.
SAVES’s medical director, Sharon Finster, said in an email response to questions from The Watchdog that she could not comment on specific cases, but that the hospital “is deeply committed to providing compassionate, high-quality emergency and specialty care and supporting pet families during some of the most stressful moments they face.”
“I think if there’s an expectation that corporates are going to somehow lower prices, because, again, they’re playing in a different realm … that does not happen,” said Elaine Klesius, a vet who owns Fairview Animal Hospital and previously worked at a different practice before and after its acquisition by a private equity-backed firm. “Those financial advantages are not passed on to the clients. If anything, prices increase because, when you’re working in small animal practice, you’re working with business owners who are not trained businessmen and women, who’ve probably been undercharging forever.”
Otto Sharp examines a patient while his golden retriever, Scout, looks on. The dog is a regular presence at Swannanoa Valley. // Watchdog photo by Katie Linsky Shaw
Two years ago, Nicole Hardy’s 4-year-old mutt, Juniper, stopped urinating. With the dog in distress — from what Hardy later learned was a rare genetic disorder causing urethra dysfunction — they wound up at SAVES. Hardy remembered thinking that the lobby felt “like a fancy hotel.”
The hospital estimated that Juniper’s care would cost between $1,500 and $3,000, Hardy said. She consented. Juniper died two days later, and Hardy received a bill for more than $5,000, including procedures she said she hadn’t agreed to. (The hospital reduced the bill after she complained, she said.) She came away feeling that the hospital had tried to use Juniper’s distress as an opportunity to inflate costs.
“We were really boxed in,” Hardy said. “I do understand that obviously things cost money. I understand that you have overhead and you have to pay people. It was just so outrageously expensive, and then they added more things. It felt very, very excessive to me.”
While private vets still operate autonomously, some corporate outfits have set policies that require first-opinion vets to refer animals to specialists for many surgeries, said Leigh Ann Hamon, the founder of Cane Creek Animal Clinic and Equine. As a result, costs escalate severely — sometimes forcing owners who can’t afford care to face a terrible decision.
“A lot of times that means the dog gets put down,” she said.
While private vets still operate autonomously, some corporate outfits have set policies that require first-opinion vets to refer animals to specialists for many surgeries, said Leigh Ann Hamon, the founder of Cane Creek Animal Clinic and Equine. As a result, costs escalate severely. “A lot of times that means the dog gets put down,” she said. // Watchdog photo by Katie Linsky Shaw
As costs for pet owners climb, animal welfare experts worry about ripple effects. Erica Paschold, the director of operations for Mountain Pet Rescue, said she’s alarmed by rising neuter-spay costs. Recently, she said, an acquaintance described being quoted $950 by her regular vet to neuter a male dog.
“I feel like people are being faced with, do I pay my rent or mortgage, or do I get my dog or cat fixed?” she said.
The inability to afford a pet’s financial upkeep has consistently been among the most common drivers for animal surrenders in Buncombe County, said Caroline Dougherty, the senior manager of communications and marketing for the Asheville Humane Society, which operates the county animal shelter.
It’s hard to draw definite conclusions from the shelter’s data on surrenders, Dougherty said, because of exceptional factors at play, including the fallout of the pandemic — when many people adopted animals that they were ultimately unable to keep — and Tropical Storm Helene, which forced it to temporarily close intake and adoptions. The Humane Society has also expanded the assistance it provides to struggling pet owners — an effort, she said, “to make surrendering a pet a last resort, helping to keep pets in loving homes.” Along with food, supplies, and behavioral support, the organization provides hundreds of vouchers a year to families struggling to afford vet care. Between 2020 and 2025, it handed out nearly 4,000 such vouchers, worth some $673,000; those numbers peaked in 2023 and hit a six-year low last year.
For years, Paschold’s organization has given adopters a list of local clinics that have agreed to waive vet-visit fees for rescue animals’ first appointments. In her experience, everyone benefits: New pet owners face lower cost barriers, and practices get to establish clients who may stay with them for years.
But as area practices have corporatized, with office managers rather than veterinarians calling the shots, Paschold has found that list difficult to maintain.
“The amount of calls that I’ve gotten from the new practice manager that is like, ‘Take us off your list immediately, we are not giving anything out for free, that is ludicrous,’ is skyrocketing,” she said. “And then someone else gets in there 6 months later and says, ‘We want to be on your list, please put us on that.’ … I’m not talking to real people that are invested in the business.”
For some pet owners, leaving a corporate practice is less about savings than it is peace of mind. When Nora, an Asheville native, returned to town after years away, they established their cats at Charlotte Street Animal Hospital, where their childhood dog had gone. In the interim, the hospital had been acquired by Mission Pet Health. (Nora works for a private equity-backed company in a different sector. The Watchdog agreed to identify them only by their first name to protect them from professional retaliation.)
Nora was impressed with some of the vets they saw there but felt less comfortable with others. They described one vet, whom they’d never seen before, botching a vaccination when the needle slipped and part of the solution shot into the air: “It was almost comedically bad,” they said. When they adopted a cat who was already established at the Cat Clinic of Asheville, they found themselves impressed by the level of attention the cat received and began the process of leaving Charlotte Street. (Charlotte Street did not respond to a request for comment.)
Nora hasn’t found the new practice cheaper, they said, and it has more limited hours. But they feel confident in their cats’ medical care, and the switch fits into a philosophy of ethical spending informed by their own experience with private equity.
“When your company’s run by people who started it and put effort into it, the owners care about making a product,” they said. “Once you’re bought by private equity — and it may be the same with publicly traded, but private equity has perfected this — you’re no longer in the business of selling a product to customers. You’re in the business of selling growth to investors.”
Veterinarians who have left the corporate world for independent practices, or who have moved between the two planes, describe a similar sense of alienation. Many entered the profession because they felt called to it, not because they saw it as a lucrative career; having to do business was the cost of doing business.
Steven Valeika began his career in small-animal medicine before pivoting to epidemiology, becoming a professor and researcher of infectious disease transmission at the University of Georgia. But he found himself being pulled back to his original pursuit, and when he moved to Asheville in 2012, he began working at a local vet practice.
He stayed for more than nine years. But during the pandemic, he said, the practice’s owners began raising prices as they neared retirement.
“It felt like they were trying to kind of fatten the pig as much as possible, to make themselves attractive to corporate ownership,” Valeika said. “I felt like, in good conscience, I could not continue to work there.”
He left the practice, which did eventually sell to a private equity-backed consolidator. A noncompete clause in his contract meant he had to bide time patching together stints of “relief” work, temporary fill-in gigs at both corporate and independent clinics, before he could take a full-time position at the independent All Pets Animal Hospital and Rehabilitation Center. He appreciates having the freedom to give clients multiple treatment options rather than pushing the most expensive one.
“The amount of testing that’s recommended (at corporate clinics), I just feel like everything is a little over the top,” Valeika said. “Not that any of it’s bad medicine, but it’s just like always pushing people toward the Cadillac instead of the Honda.”
There’s another feature of Valeika’s career that, he acknowledges, is rare for vets entering the field today: He graduated from college, in 2001, with no debt. Today, new graduates often leave school with student loans well into the six figures: The American Veterinary Medical Association’s annual survey of graduating seniors found that, in 2025, new vets entered the workforce with an average of more than $174,000 in debt. (Removing those with no debt brought the average above $212,000.) It also found that new grads who had already landed jobs owed, on average, about 40 percent more than they would make in a year. That debt-to-income ratio is lower than it was for much of the 2010s, when it hovered around two-to-one, but it has climbed over the past few years as pandemic-era financial relief programs have ended.
“The debt that the people have coming out of veterinary school, they cannot afford to buy a practice or even buy into a practice,” said Hamon, the Cane Creek founder, who eventually sold the practice to another independent vet. “They can barely pay off their debt. We’ve sort of set ourselves up.”
Johansson, the Beacon owner, said he tells aspiring vets that they might as well get an MBA, too — “then you could probably justify the expense of it.” Independent vets fear that these financial barriers have foreclosed traditional routes into small practices and forced newcomers toward large corporations, which more frequently offer benefits such as loan repayment assistance and continuing education stipends.
A few years ago, Sharp, the Swannanoa Valley Animal Hospital owner, set up a booth at a career day at North Carolina State University’s veterinary college, the largest in the state. His practice had been looking to hire a young vet, someone just out of college, but was getting nowhere. As students began stopping by, he suddenly understood why.
“They were all freshmen and sophomores,” he said. “I’m like, ‘Wait a minute, I’m trying to hire … Where are the seniors?’ And they’re like, ‘Oh, they’ve already had job offers their junior year.’”
Corporate vets were wooing new vets before they even had their degrees, Sharp said. He talked to an operator at another booth who described how her company, based in another state, would entice students for internships by paying to fly them in and lodge them in Airbnbs. It was a level of investment he couldn’t compete with.
“They have deep pockets,” he said, “and right now there’s a shortage of vets, and so they’re throwing top dollar.”
According to a Journal of the American Veterinary Medicine Association survey, veterinarians at independent practices report satisfaction rates equal to their corporate counterparts — higher when it comes to aspects like hospital culture, mentorship, and relationships with clients. “I’ve really learned that what we do is not so much about hanging a shingle and saying, ‘We take pets,’” said Jeff Johansson, owner of the independent Beacon Veterinary Hospital. “You build relationships with the community. When we first got back, we would have hour-long appointments, just to let people talk.” // Watchdog photo by Katie Linsky Shaw
Some independent operators said they’re beginning to feel pinched. Though they face the same economic pressures as corporations, they lack many of their counterparts’ advantages, such as the option to buy supplies in bulk or send bloodwork to an in-house lab — not to mention marketing departments, standardized human resources and group health insurance. They’re competing with corporate practices that can offer hefty benefits packages while also trying to keep their vets from burning out. In Asheville, where the cost of living has well outpaced wages for many working people, they have to find ways to pay support staffers a living wage.
“We have to pay our technicians a lot of money for them to be able to afford to live here,” Valeika said.
In 2024, after flooding from Tropical Storm Helene totaled the building that housed Beacon Veterinary Hospital, Johansson had to find a way to keep paying his staff while looking for a new location and fighting FEMA for flood-insurance payouts. Even still, when the practice reopened, he found a sense of reassurance that points to a broader truth: For all the nominal advantages held by large corporations, according to the Journal of the American Veterinary Medicine Association survey, vets at independent practices report satisfaction rates equal to their corporate counterparts — higher when it comes to aspects like hospital culture, mentorship, and relationships with clients.
“I’ve really learned that what we do is not so much about hanging a shingle and saying, ‘We take pets,’” Johansson said. “You build relationships with the community. When we first got back, we would have hour-long appointments, just to let people talk.”
Despite the challenges independent vets face, many said they’re committed to making sure corporate entities don’t completely control the local pet landscape. When Hamon first decided to sell Cane Creek, she promised herself that she’d sooner shutter the practice and sell the property than allow a large company to take it over.
“I was determined that I was not going to sell out,” she said.
Others have found winding, unconventional paths. Soon after Beth Hampton Jones graduated from vet school in 1993, she and her then-husband, also a vet, bought a longstanding practice in Lenoir, a small city in Caldwell County. In 2011, amid their divorce, they sold it to National Veterinary Associates. She returned to Asheville, her hometown; she worked for a corporate vaccine clinic, then opened an animal acupuncture and herbal-medicine practice. A few years ago, she moved to Waynesville, where she started offering pet hospice services.
“It’s like the old days,” she said. “People know what they need. They’re dealing directly with me. There’s no corporate policy or anything. We just proceed in the best way for the patient and owner.”
After so many years in so many corners of the animal medicine world, Hampton Jones sees the rising costs and consternations in vet care as being tied to corporate moneymaking tactics, changing animal healthcare technology, and a pet culture that encourages owners to spend heavily — a “circle of frustration.”
Owners may find a measure of protection in pet insurance, she said, a sentiment some other vets echoed. But private equity firms have turned their eyes toward that sector, too. In its 2025 mid-year report, JAB Holding Company reported mild revenue growth — less than 2 percent — for National Veterinary Associates. Meanwhile, its two pet insurance interests both saw growth well above 20 percent. The report disclosed that in the first half of 2025, JAB had made substantial new investments in that sector: more than $500 million, cash.
- Left – Veterinary assistant Dalia Escobar calms puppy Miles as his nails are trimmed by vet assistant Kaela Ammons at Partners Animal Hospital in south Asheville. Joan and Lori Francz, holding their other dog Griffin, watch in back. // Watchdog photo by Katie Linsky Shaw
- Top right – Thank you notes cover a bulletin board inside Fairview Animal Hospital. // Watchdog photo by Katie Linsky Shaw
- Middle right – Otto Sharp fills out a patient chart while a cat is brought in at Swannanoa Valley Animal Hospital. // Watchdog photo by Katie Linsky Shaw
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Asheville Watchdog is a nonprofit news team producing stories that matter to Asheville and Buncombe County. Jack Evans is an investigative reporter who previously worked at the Tampa Bay Times. You can reach him via email at [email protected]. Sally Kestin is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter. She can be reached via email at [email protected]. John Boyle has been covering Asheville and surrounding communities since the 20th century. You can reach him at (828) 337-0941, or via email at [email protected]. The Watchdog’s reporting is made possible by donations from the community. To show your support for this vital public service go to avlwatchdog.org/support-our-publication/.
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