<![CDATA[The Bird Bath]]>https://thebirdbathvet.substack.comhttps://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!gdbg!,w_256,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fac33e4d6-43ee-4327-902d-964fe583744b_500x500.pngThe Bird Bathhttps://thebirdbathvet.substack.comSubstackTue, 01 Sep 2026 16:48:05 GMT<![CDATA[The Bird Bath: Last week of August 2026]]>https://thebirdbathvet.substack.com/p/the-bird-bath-last-week-of-august-216https://thebirdbathvet.substack.com/p/the-bird-bath-last-week-of-august-216Thu, 27 Aug 2026 13:59:17 GMT

Dive In

Stories that deserve an extra look

Somebody just bought the front desk for $650 million

On August 18, Weave Communications agreed to sell itself to Francisco Partners for $7.40 a share in cash. All cash, no stock, roughly $650 million. The board took a 34% premium and the NYSE listing goes away in Q4.

Weave is the phone system, texting, reminders, review requests and card reader sitting on the counter at about 40,000 healthcare locations. Dental, optometry, specialty medical, and vet.

The numbers that got it there:

  • $67.5M in Q2 revenue, up 15.5%. Not a broken company. Full-year guide of $273-275M.

  • Net revenue retention: 92%. That is the tell. The existing customer base shrinks a little every year, so all growth has to be bought new. Gross retention 89%.

  • Back out the $78.5M of cash and the deal values Weave at roughly 2x revenue. The median software acquisition in 2026 is going for 3.2x, down from 5.8x in 2022.

  • Weave IPO’d in November 2021 at $24 a share. The exit is 69% below the IPO price, five years later.

  • Meanwhile the AI is actually working: 70 million custom AI interactions in Q2, up 165%. Call Intelligence listened to 14.5 million calls and flagged 810,000 unbooked opportunities.

Francisco Partners is not a tourist. Roughly $75 billion raised, and it already owns bswift, Merative, QGenda, GoodRx and Zocdoc. It bought AdvancedMD for $1.1 billion earlier this year. Weave is the next brick in a stack of software for small healthcare practices, and veterinary is one of four doors into that stack.

Why you should care

Run the back-of-envelope on a good general practice at a low-double-digit EBITDA multiple and you land around 2x revenue. Same as Weave. The market is currently paying about the same for a dollar of clinic revenue as for a dollar of AI-powered software revenue attached to 40,000 locations.

Beyond the Branch

Intriguing news from outside the veterinary industry

The US Army trades four days for two years

Grand Theft Auto VI comes out November 19. It will be one of the largest entertainment events of the year.

Somebody at the 9th Brigade Engineer Battalion at Fort Stewart, Georgia did the math on that.

Reenlist between August 1 and November 14, minimum two years, and you get a special four-day pass. Timed, obviously, to the launch. A career counselor came up with it, and the commanders signed off. Twenty soldiers have taken it so far.

Not a signing bonus. Not tuition. Not a plaque. Four days off to sit on a couch and commit felonies in Leonida.

And it is not really about the game. The counselor’s other motive was simply to make soldiers look at their reenlistment date, in a system where that date usually arrives as a surprise on a form. The pitch worked because it named something specific the person actually wanted, at a specific moment, from someone who had clearly been paying attention.

Why you should care

Vet med has spent five years in a signing bonus arms race, matching each other dollar for dollar, and turnover has barely moved. The bonus is generic by design, which is exactly why it does not stick. The four-day GTA pass is not clever because it is cheap. It is clever because someone knew what a specific 24-year-old was looking forward to and built the offer around it. That is not a compensation strategy, it is knowing your staff. Ask your team what they are actually counting down to. Somebody has a wedding, a concert, a hunting opener, a launch day. The answer is cheaper than a bonus and it is the thing they will remember.

Featured Events

Is Vet Assembly on your calendar yet? Explore a new kind of gathering: a smaller, more considered room where corporate vet groups and the partners who serve them can actually talk. No booths, better conversations, and a setting that finally matches the caliber of people in the industry. 🌟 Looking for more info, email Ben Barter. November 3-4, 2026; Atlanta

Explore our Full List of Conferences

KC Animal Health Corridor Summit; Kansas City, Missouri
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September 17-19, 2026

SWVS; San Antonio, TX
September 17-20, 2026

AHNTI US; Boston, MA
October 26-28, 2026
🎙️The Bird Bath LIVE

Vet Assembly; Atlanta, GA
November 3-4, 2026
🌟 Explore a new kind of gathering: a smaller, more considered room where corporate vet groups and the partners who serve them can actually talk. No booths, better conversations, and a setting that finally matches the caliber of people in the industry. 🌟 Looking for more info, email Ben Barter.

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]]><![CDATA[The Bird Bath: Third week of August 2026]]>https://thebirdbathvet.substack.com/p/the-bird-bath-third-week-of-august-305https://thebirdbathvet.substack.com/p/the-bird-bath-third-week-of-august-305Thu, 20 Aug 2026 14:03:09 GMT

Dive In

Stories that deserve an extra look

Visits are down. The companies that sell into those visits are having a field day spending on their own stock.

Almost every public name in pet and animal health authorized or expanded a buyback in 2026. Put them next to each other and it stops looking like a coincidence.

Buybacks, in plain English: a company takes its own cash and buys its own shares on the open market. Those shares get retired. Nobody new owns anything, there’s just less stock in existence, so every share still out there represents a slightly bigger piece of the company. Earnings per share goes up even if the company never earned an extra dollar. Companies do it for one of two reasons. Either they think their stock is cheap and buying it is a good trade, or they have cash and can’t find anything better to spend it on. The second one is the interesting one, because “anything better” includes new plants, new products, new field reps, and new clinics to sell into.

  • IDEXX repurchased $332 million in Q2 and $693 million year to date, shrinking diluted shares about 2%. Management called share repurchases its preferred capital deployment. In the same quarter, US same-store clinical visits fell 1.3%, with wellness visits down 3.4%. Companion animal diagnostics recurring revenue still grew 10.3% organically. CFO Andrew Emerson pointed at economic pressure, discretionary pet care, and slower puppy adoptions.

  • Zoetis bought back more than $550 million in Q2, above its historical quarterly pace, with $1.8 billion left on the $6 billion authorization as of March 31. Back in December it priced $1.75 billion of 0.250% convertible notes due 2029, with substantially all of it earmarked to repurchase roughly $1.6 billion of stock. It borrowed at a quarter of a point to buy itself.

  • Chewy added $500 million to its authorization in April, on top of the ~$119 million still left from the 2024 program.

  • Freshpet authorized $150 million on May 21 and had already spent $86.5 million on 1.6 million shares by the end of July, buying near a 52-week low of $46.45. It closed yesterday at $75.03. It also raised full-year sales growth guidance to 10-12%.

  • Trupanion approved $100 million in June and disclosed it August 5, in a quarter where net pet adds accelerated 39% year over year. In July, New York regulators also signed off on a $44 million extraordinary dividend out of its insurance subsidiary.

  • Pets at Home is working through a £50 million program, buying weekly. Pet Valu took back 1.54% of its shares in the first five months of the year, into a Q1 miss and a guidance cut.

The lone holdout is Elanco, and only because it can’t yet. Debt paydown is still its number one use of free cash flow, roughly $650 million retired since 2024, net leverage at 3.1x. Management says shareholder returns come once it’s under 3.0x, which it puts in 2027.

Here’s the part worth sitting with. IDEXX grew diagnostics revenue 10% on 1.3% fewer visits. That growth came from price and from more testing per visit, not more pets through the door. And when a supplier decides the best available use of a dollar is its own equity rather than more capacity, more field support, or more clinics to sell into, that is a forecast. They are telling you what they expect volume to do.

Why you should care

For a decade the pet trade’s whole story was to spend everything on growth because the category compounds forever. In 2026 the category’s best-known names looked around, and several of them decided the highest-return thing they could buy was themselves. IDEXX said the quiet part on its own earnings call: repurchases are the preferred use of capital. These are the companies with the clearest view of clinic volume in the country, and they are not deploying against a rebound. Worth knowing what they’re planning for before you plan your own year.

Beyond the Branch

Intriguing news from outside the veterinary industry

All the cool kids are doing it. It’s the biggest year on record.

Pet and animal health didn’t invent this. They just joined the largest capital-return wave in market history.

  • Goldman Sachs expects US companies to repurchase roughly $1.4 trillion of their own shares in 2026.

  • That follows 2025, when S&P 500 buybacks passed $1.1 trillion for the first time in a calendar year.

  • Companies announced $665 billion of repurchases in the first four months of 2026 alone, the fastest start ever recorded. New authorizations are pacing toward $1.2 trillion for the year.

  • Even Berkshire Hathaway started buying back its own stock in March.

  • The mechanic everyone quietly relies on: buybacks push earnings per share higher even where revenue is flat.

Why you should care

A record $1.4 trillion is going into companies buying themselves this year, and the reason it works is that it lifts earnings per share even when the actual business is flat. That's worth remembering the next time a supplier's press release leads with EPS growth. It might mean they sold more. It might just mean there's less of them to go around. In a year when clinic visits are down and diagnostics revenue is up 10%, telling those two apart is most of the job.

Featured Events

Is Vet Assembly on your calendar yet? Explore a new kind of gathering: a smaller, more considered room where corporate vet groups and the partners who serve them can actually talk. No booths, better conversations, and a setting that finally matches the caliber of people in the industry. 🌟 Looking for more info, email Ben Barter. November 3-4, 2026; Atlanta

Explore our Full List of Conferences

KC Animal Health Corridor Summit; Kansas City, Missouri
August 31–September 1, 2026
🎙️The Bird Bath LIVE

Pawsitive Intelligence One-Day AI Summit: Reno, NV
September 9, 2026
🎉 Use code TheBirdBath100 for $100 off conference registration

AAHA Con; Portland, OR
September 17-19, 2026

SWVS; San Antonio, TX
September 17-20, 2026

AHNTI US; Boston, MA
October 26-28, 2026
🎙️The Bird Bath LIVE

Vet Assembly; Atlanta, GA
November 3-4, 2026
🌟 Explore a new kind of gathering: a smaller, more considered room where corporate vet groups and the partners who serve them can actually talk. No booths, better conversations, and a setting that finally matches the caliber of people in the industry. 🌟 Looking for more info, email Ben Barter.

Thanks for reading The Bird Bath! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

]]><![CDATA[The Bird Bath: Second week of August 2026]]>https://thebirdbathvet.substack.com/p/the-bird-bath-second-week-of-august-9b7https://thebirdbathvet.substack.com/p/the-bird-bath-second-week-of-august-9b7Thu, 13 Aug 2026 14:00:29 GMT

Dive In

Stories that deserve an extra look

Somebody listened to 2,000 exam rooms in a single day. Cost came up in all of them.

Here is a kind of industry data we have never really had. HappyDoc took 2,000 anonymized visits from 286 clinics, all on one day in early summer, and analyzed what was actually said in the room. Not a survey about what veterinarians think clients feel. What clients said, while the exam was happening.

The headline finding is the one everybody suspected and nobody could measure.

  • Cost was the top owner concern in nearly every clinical category, surfacing in more than 15% of all visits.

  • By category, owners raised cost in 42% of vaccine-related visits, 30% of dental visits, 27% of chronic allergy visits, 24% of parasite prevention visits, and 19% of wellness visits.

  • And the number that should stop you: clinicians brought cost up proactively in 3%. Three percent of wellness visits, 3% of dental, 3% of parasite prevention.

That gap is the whole report. The conversation is happening either way. The only variable is whether it happens on your terms at the start or the client’s terms at the estimate.

The leakage is documented, not inferred. Chewy, Costco, and Amazon came up by name as alternative sourcing for the exact products recommended that same visit. Chewy alone appeared in more than 1% of all visits in the dataset. In parasite prevention, 7% of appointments had owners explicitly sourcing the product somewhere else, before or after the exam. Active in-room price shopping showed up in 5% of wellness visits. The client is comparison shopping while standing in front of you.

Dental is the clearest failure and it is not a clinical failure. Dental disease turned up in nearly 12% of all visits, mostly found incidentally during wellness exams. Anesthesia risk and cost each appeared in 30% of those conversations, and they arrived together. Diagnosis correct, owner informed, nothing scheduled.

Two owner quotes from the transcripts, which are worth more than any of the percentages:

“It’s so expensive... I don’t have $500.”

“We kind of gave up... this was my last hope. Good days, bad days.”

Read the caveats before you quote the numbers. This is one day, not a year, so early-summer seasonality is baked into the allergy and parasite categories. The 286 clinics all chose to buy an AI scribe, which is not a random sample of American practice. The categories were extracted by a model reading transcripts, not counted by a human, and there is no published validation of how accurately it tagged a “cost concern.” And HappyDoc sells the software that fixes what the report finds, with a product recommendation stapled to the bottom of every section. None of that makes the pattern wrong. It points to directions, not finality.

A Day In Americas Pet Clinics - HappyDoc Report
540KB ∙ PDF file
Download
Download

Why you should care

The 3% is the actionable number in this entire issue. Every practice in the country is already having the money conversation multiple times a day. It is simply happening at the worst possible moment, after the plan is presented, when the client has to say no to a person they like about an animal they love. Nobody enjoys that, so everyone avoids starting it, which guarantees it happens at the end instead.

Moving it to the front costs nothing. It is not discounting, and it is not apologizing for your prices. It is naming the range before you recommend it, so the client is choosing between options instead of declining a number. The practices in this dataset that did it got better outcomes, and they did not get there by charging less.

Beyond the Branch

Intriguing news from outside the veterinary industry

The paycheck stopped keeping up in April

That is what cost sounds like in the exam room. Here is where it comes from, and it is not a vet story at all.

  • July CPI landed Wednesday: prices up 3.4% over twelve months, core up 2.5%.

  • Average hourly earnings are growing 3.2%, the slowest pace in five years. The July jobs report came in at minus 23,000.

  • Do the subtraction. Real earnings went negative in April and have stayed there.

  • A year ago it ran the other way: prices up 2.7%, wages up 4%. The lines crossed and did not cross back.

  • What people are borrowing for, per Ted Rossman at Money Management International: “It’s not usually a vacation or a shopping spree. Usually this is medical debt, car repairs. It’s groceries.”

  • And the part that hides all of it: the top of the income spectrum has not adjusted its spending at all, and it generates most of the spending. Aggregate consumer numbers look healthy. The median household does not feel healthy.

Why you should care

Nobody standing at your front desk is calculating real wage growth. They just know the estimate got bigger and the paycheck did not, and what comes out of their mouth is that they will think about the dental and call you back. That is the same sentence as “I don’t have $500,” arriving from four months of arithmetic that has nothing to do with pets. It has been running since April with no sign of turning around. Watch what your clients do this fall, not what the national spending numbers say they are doing. Those two things stopped agreeing in the spring.

Featured Events

Is Vet Assembly on your calendar yet? Explore a new kind of gathering: a smaller, more considered room where corporate vet groups and the partners who serve them can actually talk. No booths, better conversations, and a setting that finally matches the caliber of people in the industry. 🌟 Looking for more info, email Ben Barter. November 3-4, 2026; Atlanta

Explore our Full List of Conferences

WVC Nashville; Nashville, Tennessee
August 15–18, 2026
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KC Animal Health Corridor Summit; Kansas City, Missouri
August 31–September 1, 2026
🎙️The Bird Bath LIVE

Pawsitive Intelligence One-Day AI Summit: Reno, NV
September 9, 2026
🎉 Use code TheBirdBath100 for $100 off conference registration

AAHA Con; Portland, OR
September 17-19, 2026

SWVS; San Antonio, TX
September 17-20, 2026

AHNTI US; Boston, MA
October 26-28, 2026
🎙️The Bird Bath LIVE

Vet Assembly; Atlanta, GA
November 3-4, 2026
🌟 Explore a new kind of gathering: a smaller, more considered room where corporate vet groups and the partners who serve them can actually talk. No booths, better conversations, and a setting that finally matches the caliber of people in the industry. 🌟 Looking for more info, email Ben Barter.

Thanks for reading The Bird Bath! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

]]><![CDATA[The Bird Bath: First week of August 2026]]>https://thebirdbathvet.substack.com/p/the-bird-bath-first-week-of-august-ee7https://thebirdbathvet.substack.com/p/the-bird-bath-first-week-of-august-ee7Thu, 06 Aug 2026 14:01:13 GMT

Dive In

Stories that deserve an extra look

Three national distributors becoming two, and the FTC noticed

We went deep on Covetrus x MWI in February. It went quiet. It’s not quiet anymore.

Per multiple sources on July 28, the FTC started issuing civil investigative demands to customers and market participants, asking about distribution, market conditions, and barriers to entry. That’s what the agency reaches for when a review stops being a formality. Bloomberg followed this week with a detail worth sitting with: the questions also touch practice-management software. Covetrus owns Pulse, AVImark, and Impromed (and the industry is hot with PIMS trading whispers).

  • $3.5B, announced February. Cencora takes $1.25B cash, $800M preferred, $1.45B common, and keeps a 34.3% non-controlling stake.

  • Cencora’s FY26 guidance through September 30 doesn’t assume the deal closes. They priced in the delay themselves.

  • Antitrust attorney Joel Thayer puts the combined entity near 75% of distribution volume, against the rough 30% trigger from Philadelphia National Bank (1963). Careful with that number. It’s his public estimate, not a filing, and nobody has corroborated it.

  • Terminal tracks 34,186 brick-and-mortar practices. 23,416 are independent, 68.5%. Corporate groups negotiate distribution as a portfolio. The other two thirds take the price on the sheet.

The tell to watch is whether the FTC escalates from CIDs to a formal Second Request. That extends the clock and usually lands on a consent with divestitures, a suit to block, or clearance.

Why you should care

All year the consolidation story has been about who owns the practices. This one sits a layer up and doesn’t care about ownership at all. Covetrus x MWI changes who supplies nearly every clinic in the country, and the FTC apparently thinks it might change who runs their software too.

Beyond the Branch

Intriguing news from outside the veterinary industry

Visa just paid $2.4 billion to tell humans from bots

Monday, Visa announced it’s buying BioCatch, the Israeli behavioral biometrics firm, for $2.4 billion in cash.

  • BioCatch reads keystroke timing and touchscreen pressure to decide whether the thing using your account is a person. It covers 760 million users across roughly 350 banks.

  • Visa’s rails touch 14,500 financial institutions and 329 billion transactions a year.

  • Permira took control two years ago at $1.3 billion. Clean step-up in 24 months.

  • The reason: scams and account takeovers cost the global economy more than $1 trillion a year, and AI made running them cheap.

Why you should care

Visa didn't pay $2.4B for a fraud tool. It paid for the ability to answer one question at scale: is the thing on the other end real. That question is becoming its own product category, and it's showing up here too. Is this client's payment plan real. Is this online pharmacy real. Is this AI's read on the cytology real. The tools got good enough to trust and nobody built the layer that tells you when not to. Somebody is going to sell that layer to our industry, and it won't be cheap.

Featured Events

Explore our Full List of Conferences

WVC Nashville; Nashville, Tennessee
August 15–18, 2026
🎙️The Bird Bath LIVE

KC Animal Health Corridor Summit; Kansas City, Missouri
August 31–September 1, 2026
🎙️The Bird Bath LIVE

Pawsitive Intelligence One-Day AI Summit: Reno, NV
September 9, 2026
🎉 Use code TheBirdBath100 for $100 off conference registration

AAHA Con; Portland, OR
September 17-19, 2026

SWVS; San Antonio, TX
September 17-20, 2026

AHNTI US; Boston, MA
October 26-28, 2026
🎙️The Bird Bath LIVE

Vet Assembly; Atlanta, GA
November 3-4, 2026
🌟 Explore a new kind of gathering: a smaller, more considered room where corporate vet groups and the partners who serve them can actually talk. No booths, better conversations, and a setting that finally matches the caliber of people in the industry. 🌟 Looking for more info, email Ben Barter.

Thanks for reading The Bird Bath! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

]]><![CDATA[The Bird Bath: Last week of July 2026]]>https://thebirdbathvet.substack.com/p/the-bird-bath-last-week-of-july-2026https://thebirdbathvet.substack.com/p/the-bird-bath-last-week-of-july-2026Thu, 30 Jul 2026 14:03:06 GMT

Dive In

Stories that deserve an extra look

The AVMA antitrust case just woke up

We covered LMU’s filing back in June 2025. We covered the DOJ’s statement of interest on the pod in December and the AVMA’s response in January. Then the case went quiet, and it stayed quiet for a very long time.

Last week it moved. Not a ruling. A short order granting a motion that had been pending since November.

Straight off the docket:

  • September 3, 2025. AVMA moves to dismiss. Two days later, it moves to temporarily stay discovery. LMU opposes the stay.

  • November 10, 2025. LMU asks permission to file one more brief. AVMA consents.

  • December 15, 2025. DOJ files a statement of interest. AVMA responds January 8.

  • February 23, 2026. The assigned magistrate judge recuses. That’s the case’s second magistrate change; a third takes over the next day.

  • July 23, 2026. The court grants LMU’s November motion. Eight and a half months later, unopposed the entire time. LMU files the brief the same day, because it had been written since the fall.

Briefing on a motion filed in September 2025 wrapped last week. Just under eleven months. The motion to stay discovery was fully briefed by late September, referred to a magistrate on November 12, and the docket shows no ruling on it. No scheduling order appears on the docket either. Thirteen months in, the motion to dismiss is still pending.

And there’s a clock running. LMU’s Harrogate campus went on probationary accreditation in October 2024. Under the COE’s published policies, major deficiencies “must be corrected in two years,” with reports to the Council every six months, and AVMA’s brief notes probation can be extended. AVMA’s public listing puts Harrogate’s next evaluation in 2026. So a scheduled evaluation lands this year, quite possibly before this case clears a single procedural hurdle.

What’s actually in the file

Worth reading the briefs rather than the press releases, because both sides are sharper than the coverage suggested.

The Harrogate fight turns on one accreditation standard: research. You don’t have to take LMU’s word for it. The AVMA’s own public list of accredited colleges shows Harrogate’s status as “Probationary Accreditation (w/major deficiency in Standard 10, Research Program),” next evaluation 2026. (LMU’s complaint is broader than that one standard, but this is the deficiency on the record.)

Here’s what the COE’s October 2024 report said about that deficiency, as quoted in LMU’s complaint:

  • “Forty-seven of 58 LMU CVM faculty have a research FTE less than 20%, and only 6 of 58 with greater than 50% research FTE.”

  • “Over the last 5 years there have been 2 federal extramural grants with no awards in the last two years and only 2 state extramural grants during that same time.”

  • “Greater than 90% of grant funding comes from intramural funds, which are awarded by the LMU Research Committee.”

LMU’s answer: that money is NIH grants, state appropriations, and endowments. Land grants and Ivies have it. A tuition-funded private school does not and structurally cannot, no matter how its graduates perform.

The cost math in the complaint is the part worth sitting with. LMU says Murray State priced a distributive model DVM program in Kentucky at $89 million, and that adding a teaching hospital would have cost another $150 million on top. It estimates distributive students perform roughly 50 spays or neuters before graduation, and points out that a majority of new medical schools have adopted the same model, with those graduates more likely to end up in rural practice.

Then the timing. Two years before the probation decision, the COE approved LMU adding 100 students a year and, per the complaint, raised no concerns about research. Same program, same faculty, different answer in 2024.

The AVMA’s motion is mostly procedural, and that’s its strength.

  1. Nothing has happened yet. Harrogate remains accredited during probation. Per the brief, the claims only ripen if a program is placed on terminal accreditation or denied reasonable assurance, invokes the available appeals, and loses.

  2. Even then, the harm would come from state laws requiring graduation from an accredited program as a condition of licensure. State action is immune from antitrust scrutiny. Take it up with the states.

  3. Antitrust protects competition, not competitors. LMU’s own complaint counts 34 accredited or provisionally accredited DVM programs. AVMA’s brief argues the Sixth Circuit has never found a denial of school accreditation to support a successful antitrust claim, citing a 2001 case involving interior design accreditation.

  4. Objections to COE standards belong at the Department of Education, which AVMA says reviewed both the standards and the COE relationship and found no fault.

And the Florida half of the complaint has been overtaken by events. LMU sued in part because it feared its Orange Park campus would be denied. On August 28, 2025, roughly ten weeks after filing, the COE issued Orange Park a Letter of Reasonable Assurance, which LMU announced as clearing the way for a first cohort in June 2026. AVMA’s public list now shows Orange Park with Provisional Accreditation, last evaluation 2025, next evaluation 2027. Under the COE’s own policies, provisional status is granted on the day the first cohort starts class. So on the Florida side, LMU got the outcome it was worried about losing.

And the detail nobody has written about: this judge has ruled on this plaintiff before. In 2012, LMU’s law school sued the ABA over accreditation in this same district, in front of this same judge, Thomas Varlan. At the preliminary injunction stage he found LMU was not likely to succeed on its due process claim, for two reasons: it had not exhausted the administrative remedy available to it, and it had not shown the decision was arbitrary and unreasonable or an abuse of discretion. That was a preliminary ruling on a due process claim, not a final antitrust judgment. The “great deference” standard he applied traces to a 2006 Sixth Circuit decision involving the ABA and Cooley Law School. AVMA’s brief cites LMU’s 2012 case three times, the first on page 1.

The same fight, one profession over

While the vet case sat still, the legal profession’s version accelerated.

On July 14, 2026, the FTC announced it had endorsed an Ohio Supreme Court proposal to end the ABA’s control over whether an Ohio bar applicant’s legal education is sufficient to practice in the state. The letter came from the directors of the Office of Policy Planning and the Bureau of Competition, authorized on a 2-0 Commission vote. Its argument: restricting the supply of lawyers “might increase compensation for ABA members, but it does so by imposing significant burdens on Ohioans seeking legal representation.” It notes the ABA’s accreditation group is “dominated by law school faculty and administrators with strong incentives to thwart lower cost alternatives,” and it points back to a 1995 DOJ civil suit that alleged the ABA “allowed its law school accreditation process to be captured by those with a direct interest in its outcome” and “at times acted as a guild.” That was an allegation in a complaint, not a judicial finding.

Per the same FTC release, the Florida and Texas Supreme Courts have already amended their rules so the ABA no longer has the final say as sole gatekeeper of educational requirements, the Tennessee Supreme Court is considering reducing its reliance on ABA accreditation, and the Department of Education is supporting the entry of new accrediting bodies in higher education.

Read that against the AVMA’s own defense. AVMA says the harm comes from state licensure rules, not the COE, and that objections belong at the Department of Education. Both points are legally serious. They also point at the two places currently under the most pressure. A state board can stop requiring a COE-accredited degree. The Department of Education can recognize an additional accreditor. Neither requires Judge Varlan to lift a finger.

Why you should care

With the briefing wrapped, Varlan can rule any time. If he dismisses on ripeness, the dispute comes back the moment LMU’s Tennessee campus goes terminal, and their next evaluation is scheduled for this year. If the case survives, discovery would open into how the COE sets and applies its standards, and that material has never been produced in litigation.

Beyond the Branch

Intriguing news from outside the veterinary industry

There was always a guy in the cabinet

Best tech story of the month, and it ends today.

Quick history. In 1769, a Hungarian engineer named Wolfgang von Kempelen rolled out a chess-playing machine and toured it around Europe. Gears, levers, a carved wooden figure in a turban. It beat Napoleon. It beat Ben Franklin. Crowds lost their minds.

There was a guy inside. A chess master, folded into the cabinet, working the pieces with levers. Ran for decades before anyone caught on.

So in November 2005, when Amazon launched a marketplace where you could farm out little digital chores to a global pool of anonymous humans while your product looked like it ran on pure software, they named it Mechanical Turk. On purpose. They even coined a phrase for it: “artificial artificial intelligence.” Nobody has ever told on themselves more cheerfully.

What did the humans do? Transcribed audio. Flagged sketchy content. Verified restaurant listings. Solved CAPTCHAs, which means people were paid pennies to prove they weren’t robots. Workers weren’t names, they were numbers. That was the design.

Then it got serious. MTurk quietly became the labeling factory for modern AI. The human judgment that taught models what a stop sign looks like and which answer sounds more helpful. Benchmark datasets. Reinforcement learning from human feedback. Thousands of academic papers. Load-bearing infrastructure, held up by people earning a median of about $2 an hour, with only about 4% clearing the federal minimum wage. Amazon’s cut: 20% per task.

Now the turn, and it is delicious.

In June 2023, researchers at EPFL published a paper with the greatest title in the field: “Artificial Artificial Artificial Intelligence.” They combined keystroke detection with a synthetic-text classifier and estimated that on one summarization task, 33% to 46% of MTurk workers were using LLMs to do the work and submitting it as their own.

Humans hired to be the machine, quietly hiring a machine to be the human. Von Kempelen would have wept with joy.

Same month, a PNAS study put the last nail in: ChatGPT beat crowd workers on text annotation by roughly 25 percentage points, at about one twentieth the cost per annotation.

And so, 21 years in, AWS moved Mechanical Turk to its “Services in Maintenance” list. As of July 30, no new customers. Existing requesters and workers carry on, no features get added, no final shutdown date announced. The internet’s most honest business model goes out with a docs-page update.

The uncomfortable part nobody wants to sit with: a lot of the benchmark and preference data the whole industry trusts was collected on that platform, some of it after ChatGPT shipped. Which means some of the “human” signal used to train and grade AI may have been AI all along. That’s not a data quality footnote. That’s a circle.

Why you should care

Every AI product has a cabinet, and it's a fair question how much of it is gears. Sometimes the answer is "there's a person in there," and honestly, sometimes that's the better product. A scribe with human review beats a fully automatic one that confidently invents a weight. The problem isn't people in the loop, it's not being told. So ask your vendors two boring questions: what part of this is a human, and what was the model trained on. And keep your own records clean enough to be worth something, because the thing MTurk's ending really proves is that genuine human judgment got scarce and expensive at exactly the moment everyone started pretending it was free.

So the next time a demo goes suspiciously well, it's worth asking what the crowds in 1769 never thought to ask. Is anybody in there?

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]]><![CDATA[The Bird Bath: Third week of July 2026]]>https://thebirdbathvet.substack.com/p/the-bird-bath-third-week-of-july-20dhttps://thebirdbathvet.substack.com/p/the-bird-bath-third-week-of-july-20dThu, 23 Jul 2026 14:00:38 GMT

Dive In

Stories that deserve an extra look

CVS just opened 9,000 pet pharmacies

On July 21, CVS Pharmacy started filling prescriptions for dogs and cats at roughly 9,000 locations nationwide. Not a pilot. Not select markets. All of them.

  • What they’ll fill: antibiotics, allergy meds, flea and tick control, insulin, pain relievers.

  • How it works: the client brings a written script, or the vet sends it over. Pickup in store, delivery where eligible.

  • The part that matters: pets get added to the CVS.com profile and the CVS Health app. Auto-refill. Refill sync. The same retention machinery CVS runs on human prescriptions, pointed at your patients.

  • What’s next: e-prescribing for veterinarians “in the coming months.” That’s the switch. Written scripts are friction. An e-Rx button is a default.

    “CVS Pharmacy can now serve every member of the family.” Sid Tenneti, SVP and interim president of pharmacy and consumer wellness.

  • Bonus: the Pet Central store brand expands with new items in September. Shampoos, dental treats, litter, training pads. The whole aisle.

What Terminal’s data says about the exposure:

  • 32,620 active brick-and-mortar practices in the US. 68% independent, 31% corporate.

  • Only about 6,500 of them (roughly 1 in 5) show a client-facing home-delivery pharmacy on their website. And the split is nearly even between independents and corporate groups, so this isn’t a case of the big platforms being three moves ahead. Most of the industry is still counting on the shelf behind the front desk.

  • Roughly 6,400 practices sit in small-town or rural markets, where the retail pharmacy counter is often the closest one there is.

CVS didn't do this because pet meds are a fat margin. It did it because 9,000 stores full of declining foot traffic need a reason for somebody to walk in, and a diabetic cat refills every month like clockwork.

Why you should care

Convenience keeps winning fights that quality was supposed to win; think UberX over a Town Car, Temu over craftsmen, K-cups over baristas. Clients aren't abandoning your refills because they doubt you. They're leaving because CVS is open at 9pm, on the way home, and already has their phone number.

The practices that keep pharmacy revenue (if anyone does) won't be the ones that argue for it. They'll be the ones that made the refill happen without the client thinking about it.

Beyond the Branch

Intriguing news from outside the veterinary industry

While CVS was adding pets, the human drug business kept doing the thing that made CVS need pets in the first place: going direct.

  • Zepbound through LillyDirect has gone from $1,086/month list to $299/month for self-pay vials. Higher doses land at $449.

  • Average cash prices for branded GLP-1s now sit around $299 to $350, down from over $1,000 in early 2024.

  • Medicare coverage at roughly $50/month starts this month.

  • The casualty is the rebate-heavy model that PBMs were built on. When the manufacturer sells to the patient at a clean price, the middle gets thin fast.

Two years ago the story was shortages and compounders. Now it’s a manufacturer with a website, a price, and no interest in whoever used to sit in between.

Why you should care

  • Practice owners: every industry with a dispensing professional in the middle eventually gets asked what the middle is for. Have an answer that isn’t “because we always have.”

  • Vet pharma: the direct-to-consumer playbook works, and your customers can see it working.

  • Everyone: disintermediation doesn’t arrive as a competitor. It arrives as a discount.

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]]><![CDATA[The Bird Bath: Second week of July 2026]]>https://thebirdbathvet.substack.com/p/the-bird-bath-second-week-of-july-420https://thebirdbathvet.substack.com/p/the-bird-bath-second-week-of-july-420Thu, 16 Jul 2026 15:49:44 GMT

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Stories that deserve an extra look

Bond Vet and Small Door Veterinary finalized their merger on July 9. It’s the most recent in the trend of consolidating vet groups, and the numbers are worth sitting with.

The combined company:

  • 55+ clinics across the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, and Midwest. Terminal counts 60 open today

  • 500,000+ pets served

  • 1,000+ team members, including 170+ veterinarians

  • $363.5M raised between them. Bond Vet took $245M (Warburg Pincus, Talisman Capital). Small Door took $118.5M (Valspring, Primary Venture Partners, Lerer Hippeau, Toba, and others)

  • Terms undisclosed

The split: Bond Vet brings 47 open locations. Small Door brings 13.

Leadership: Florent Peyre, Small Door’s co-founder, is CEO. Dr. Jamie Richardson is Chief Medical Officer. Joe Altobelli, Bond Vet’s president and CFO, moves to executive strategic advisor. Both brands keep their own identity for now.

Where they actually are. From The Terminal:

Three metros carry 55 of the 60. This is a dense-urban company, and it never pretended otherwise.

Now the part that jumps off the map. Small Door operates in exactly three metros. Bond Vet was already in all three.

  • All 13 Small Door clinics sit within 3.8 miles of a Bond Vet

  • Median distance to the nearest Bond Vet: 0.66 miles

  • 6 of the 13 are within a half mile

  • Small Door Williamsburg and Bond Vet Williamsburg are 0.17 miles apart. Three-minute walk

Peyre’s framing: “This comes down to a shared vision that veterinary care can work better for pets, families, and teams.”

Read the map and you can see why it works. When your competitor is 0.17 miles away, you’re both paying Williamsburg rent to fight over the same Williamsburg client. Merge, and the rent is a network instead of a duel. Two brands, one back office, one clinical standard, one recruiting pitch, and the densest premium vet coverage in the three richest metros on the East Coast.

Why you should care

The venture-backed premium clinic isn’t looking to compete against independent clinics in Nebraska. It was competing with the other venture-backed premium clinic, and the data proves it: 0.17 miles, 0.23, 0.26, 0.27. Two firms, the same thesis, the same handful of zip codes, funded to fight each other for the same client on the same block.

The model needs high median household income. Across the newly combined company, the average county median household income is ~$99,658. 27% higher than the national average.

Beyond the Branch

Intriguing news from outside the veterinary industry

PwC’s mid-year outlook has global deal value on track for $4 trillion in 2026, the strongest year since 2021.

  • Deals over $5B account for almost half of total global deal value this year

  • 39 megadeals of $5B+ announced so far, more than 50% higher than the same period last year

  • US deal value hit $1.2 trillion in the first five months, nearly double last year’s $603B

  • Deal volume dipped 4%

That last pair is the whole story. Value nearly doubled. Volume went down.

Brian Levy, PwC’s global deals industries leader: “2026 is the year M&A supersized.” He also called it a “K-shaped M&A market” — big, well-capitalized buyers executing enormous transactions while the mid-market fights valuation gaps and financing that won’t cooperate.

Why you should care

Fewer, bigger. That’s the macro, and it’s also what happened on a street corner in Williamsburg last week.

The same force that turns 39 megadeals into half of all global deal value is what pushes two well-funded operators into one when the growth math stops working. Capital doesn’t spread out. It concentrates, it overbuilds the surest thing, then it consolidates back to something defensible.

For a practice owner, the useful read isn’t the $4 trillion. It’s the 4% volume dip underneath it. Money is getting more selective, not more available. The buyer who calls you next is bigger, slower, and pickier than the one who called in 2021, and far more interested in whether your practice is a real business than whether it’s a real story.

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]]><![CDATA[The Bird Bath: First week of July 2026]]>https://thebirdbathvet.substack.com/p/the-bird-bath-first-week-of-july-932https://thebirdbathvet.substack.com/p/the-bird-bath-first-week-of-july-932Thu, 09 Jul 2026 16:26:01 GMT

Dive In

Stories that deserve an extra look

Washington just aimed a rule at how the AVMA accredits vet schools
The AVMA Convention kicks off tomorrow in Anaheim (July 10–14). I couldn't swing it this year, but I wanted to hand you all something to chew on in the hallways between sessions.

The Trump administration’s accreditation overhaul cleared its biggest hurdle, and one line in it points straight at vet med.

The backstory, fast:

  • Springs from the April 23, 2025 executive order, “Reforming Accreditation to Strengthen Higher Education.”

  • The AIM negotiated rulemaking (Accreditation, Innovation, and Modernization) reached consensus on May 21, 2026.

  • Public comment runs this summer. If the Department of Education finalizes by November 1, most changes take effect July 1, 2027.

The part that matters for us: accreditors would be barred from seeking feedback — formal or informal — from any “related, associated, or affiliated organization.” Dues would have to be paid directly to the accreditor, which must hold full, independent control of its own budget.

Read that again with the org chart in mind. The AVMA Council on Education — the body that accredits US vet schools — lives under the AVMA umbrella. The rule is a scalpel aimed at exactly that arrangement. The Dept. of Education’s own framing calls it “ending collusion between program accreditors and related trade associations.”

AVMA is playing it cool. In their view, the COE already operates with full autonomy in its deliberations and decisions, so nothing changes day to day. But the whole design intent is to force daylight between the accreditor and the association it grew up inside. Watch whether the COE has to formally cut the cord on funding, feedback, and governance.

The reform’s headline goal is letting new accreditors in to break the monopoly. In a profession starved for capacity, could a friendlier accreditor speed new vet programs to market?

Why you should care

Every vet you'll ever hire started at a school someone had to certify. Washington just put its hand on that lever. Not the tuition, not the curriculum, but the gate itself. Loosen who gets to accredit, and you change how many schools open, how fast, who teaches, and who bankrolls them.

That's the number under every other number in this profession: the supply of veterinarians. It moves slowly, it moves quietly, and it decides your hiring market, your wage bill, and your leverage for the next twenty years. The convention will argue about AI and burnout this week. This is the story that outlasts both.

Beyond the Branch

Intriguing news from outside the veterinary industry

The last time accreditation rewired a profession

In 1910, Abraham Flexner published a single report on American medical education, funded by the Carnegie Foundation. It set hard standards: real lab science, hospital training, full-time faculty, and actual admissions bars. The Johns Hopkins model, imposed on everyone.

It worked, and it was brutal.

  • US medical schools collapsed from 148 to 66. Roughly three in four, gone.

  • The modern MD was born. Quality soared. So did cost, and so did the wall around who got in.

  • Five of the seven Black medical colleges closed. Only Howard and Meharry survived. One JAMA estimate: those closures alone cost the country a 29% shortfall in Black medical graduates a century later.

One report. One set of standards. A profession made smaller, tougher, more expensive, and less diverse for a hundred years. That’s the reach of the quietest lever in any industry.

Here’s the twist. Flexner tightened the gate. The reform on the table now yanks it the other way, breaking the incumbent’s grip and inviting new accreditors in. We know exactly what closing the gate did to a health profession. We have never watched anyone deliberately pry it open.

Why you should care

A rules change to an accrediting body sounds like the driest item in the newsletter. Flexner sounded like that too. Then it erased 82 schools and bent American medicine for a century. Vet med is smaller and quieter, but it runs on the same wiring, and the same hand is now on the switch. When someone at the convention waves this off as inside baseball, remember what the last set of standards did. The gate makes the profession. This time we're opening it.

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]]><![CDATA[The Bird Bath: End of June; Starting July 2026]]>https://thebirdbathvet.substack.com/p/the-bird-bath-end-of-june-startinghttps://thebirdbathvet.substack.com/p/the-bird-bath-end-of-june-startingThu, 02 Jul 2026 15:00:18 GMT

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Stories that deserve an extra look

The quietest fix for the vet shortage isn’t more vets. It’s finally licensing the techs you already have.

On July 1, Minnesota flipped its vet techs from a member-run certification to real state licensure through the Board of Veterinary Medicine. Small headline, big signal. It lands the same week a Colorado legislator (and vet) made the rounds arguing techs are the workforce answer nobody’s funding.

The numbers behind it, from NAVTA’s 2024 Demographic Survey (released April 2025):

  • 93% of techs want the title “Veterinary Technician” legally protected. 90% want one standardized national credential. Minnesota just delivered the first half.

  • Only 36% feel fully utilized. 48% say there’s little difference between what a credentialed tech does and what uncredentialed support staff do. The credential doesn’t mean much if the work doesn’t.

  • “Extremely satisfied” cratered to 8% in 2024, down from 25% in 2022. 56% call low pay (average ~$53,800/yr) the single most pressing issue in the profession.

  • 88% report compassion fatigue.

  • And the pipeline is thin: AVMA-accredited programs graduate only ~5,000–8,000 techs a year, roughly 70% passing the national exam on the first try.

The thesis writing itself across state boards: a licensed, protected, fully-utilized tech does more of the medicine, which frees the DVM to do what only a DVM can. Utilization, not headcount, is the lever. Licensure is how you pull it.

Why you should care

The DVM shortage gets all the airtime, but the cheaper, faster fix is sitting in your treatment room. License the role, protect the title, let techs work to the top of their training, and you get more medicine out of the same building. The states moving first are quietly rewriting who does the work.

Beyond the Branch

Intriguing news from outside the veterinary industry

Human medicine already ran this play. It’s called the nurse practitioner.

This July, New York’s full-practice-authority deadline arrives, pushing more NPs toward practicing independently. That makes 30 states plus DC where a nurse practitioner can diagnose, treat, and prescribe without a physician looking over their shoulder.

  • The driver is the same shortage: AAMC projects a ~40,000 primary-care physician shortfall this decade.

  • The result is the part vets should watch: in full-authority states, NPs don’t just fill gaps, they move into underserved areas and go self-employed, opening brand-new practice sites.

  • Congress is circling the same idea federally (the ICAN Act would let NPs practice independently under Medicare and Medicaid).

Elevate the mid-level credential, and you don’t just add hands. You add providers, sites, and access.

Why you should care

Every profession facing a doctor shortage ends up in the same place: expand what the people one rung down are licensed to do. Nursing has a 30-state head start on the argument vet med is just now having. If you want to know where the tech-licensure trend goes, watch the NP.

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]]><![CDATA[The Bird Bath: Fourth week of June 2026]]>https://thebirdbathvet.substack.com/p/the-bird-bath-fourth-week-of-junehttps://thebirdbathvet.substack.com/p/the-bird-bath-fourth-week-of-juneThu, 25 Jun 2026 14:03:23 GMT

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Stories that deserve an extra look

Rhode Island became the latest state to let a vet start treating your pet over video. Governor McKee signed it June 23. The votes weren’t close, Senate 32-6, House 63-0. Near-unanimous, which almost never happens in this fight.

Small state, big tell. It’s the newest dot on a map that’s been turning green one square at a time, and the telehealth fight is really a fight about something much bigger.

The one question that controls everything

Forget the video call. Anyone can do a video call. The whole battle is over one line: can a vet establish a VCPR (the veterinarian-client-patient relationship) remotely, or do they have to lay hands on the animal first.

That’s the hinge. Establish it remotely and you unlock remote prescribing, refills, follow-ups, the entire virtual-care business. Require an in-person visit first and telehealth is just a nicety bolted onto a clinic you already drove to.

Where the country actually stands (our live interactive map):

  • 10 states let telehealth establish a VCPR: AZ, CA, FL, ID, NJ, OH, VT, VA, DC, and now Rhode Island.

  • 10 more sit in the middle: telehealth’s fine, but only after that first in-person exam. New York sits in an ambiguous middle ground.

  • 31 states still require hands-on to start. Restrictive, full stop.

Why this is the live wire

Telehealth isn’t a convenience debate. It’s an access debate, and the access numbers are real.

Stack a vet-staffing crunch and clinic visits that have slid for years on top, and telehealth is the cheapest lever anyone has to reach the pets that aren’t getting seen. That’s why states keep moving. The pressure is real.

The rural case writes itself

If you want the cleanest argument for opening telehealth, go rural.

  • Nearly 1 in 3 Americans live somewhere veterinary care is already scarce. By one count, 129 million people sit in a “vet desert,” and 22% of U.S. counties have effectively zero vets per 1,000 households.

  • The USDA flagged 245 veterinary shortage areas across 47 states this year, the most on record, and rolled out a Rural Veterinary Action Plan to chase it.

  • For those families, “just bring it in” can mean a multi-hour round trip, if there’s a clinic at all. Transportation is one of the biggest barriers to care, period.

In a vet desert, telehealth isn’t a convenience. It’s the difference between a vet looking at the animal and nobody looking at all. That’s the case advocates lead with, and it’s the hardest one for a restrictive state to wave off.

The honest caveat: opening the law isn’t a magic wand. Rural broadband gaps blunt it, and a 2025 JAVMA study found rural telehealth adoption isn’t actually outpacing urban yet. Necessary, not sufficient. But you can’t adopt what your state won’t let you offer.

What’s in a name?

Here’s where it gets spicy. Access advocates, the ASPCA and the welfare groups, push telehealth as the fix for a “pet care gap.” The AVMA isn’t buying the framing and has openly pushed back on the “pet care gap” claims as the row deepens.

The AVMA’s worry is clinical. Leaning on owner-reported info and a screen, it says, “increases the risk of misdiagnosis, delayed care and inappropriate treatment,” plus the odds of missing something contagious. Its 2026 position wants the VCPR established in person, with an emergency exception, and telemedicine rules “harmonized across the nation... and strongly enforced to protect patient and public safety.”

So: access on one side, safety on the other. Both have a point. That’s why this moves state by state instead of all at once.

Three asterisks worth knowing

  • The feds haven’t moved. Even in green states, the FDA still says a VCPR can’t be established by telemedicine alone for prescribing. State says go, federal can still say stop. A green tile isn’t clean compliance.

  • The court tailwind. Hines v. Pardue (5th Circuit, 2024) struck Texas’s telehealth-VCPR ban as unconstitutional as applied, and it’s quietly shaping every bill since.

  • The count is generous. Washington’s celebrated March law gets counted in the “modernized” tally, but it still bars establishing a VCPR by telehealth alone. “10 states” is real-ish. Which 10 depends on how you squint.

Back to Rhode Island

The new law scraps RI’s old, mushy “seen or acquainted” standard and replaces it with something direct: a vet can establish the relationship over real-time audio-video and decide for themselves when the pet needs to come in. Professional judgment, not a statutory mandate.

Regionally it matters more than its size. NJ and VT were already green. RI makes three in the Northeast, and clusters tend to pull their neighbors.

What to watch

Michigan. HB 4220/4221 cleared the House 84-17 and has been parked in a Senate committee since December. If it moves, the Midwest gets its first real crack in the wall. After that, every state board staring at the access numbers has a harder time saying no.

Why you should care

Veterinary telehealth’s slow, state-by-state thaw isn’t really about video. It’s about who gets to start the relationship and, behind that, whether the half of owners already skipping care over cost get a cheaper way in. Rhode Island is a small state with a one-way signal. The map is turning green, the feds haven’t caught up, and the next domino (Michigan) is one Senate vote away. If you sell to vets, build for vets, or buy vet practices, this map is a business plan in disguise.

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]]><![CDATA[The Bird Bath: Third week of June 2026]]>https://thebirdbathvet.substack.com/p/the-bird-bath-third-week-of-june-acahttps://thebirdbathvet.substack.com/p/the-bird-bath-third-week-of-june-acaThu, 18 Jun 2026 14:44:57 GMT

Dive In

Stories that deserve an extra look

The Puppocalypse, the Kitten Craze, and the great expectations reset

CATalyst Council dropped a report on June 11 that should reset every revenue deck in the industry. Co-authored with Vetsource, Kynetec, and Dedekind Cut Labs, it does one thing very well: it takes the question everyone keeps asking “when do visits come back?” and answers it with cohort math instead of hope.

The answer: not soon, and not the way you’ve been told.

The numbers:

  • Puppy visits have fallen four straight years, down to 62% of the 2018/19 baseline — a 38% hole. They’re calling it the “Puppocalypse.”

  • Kitten visits sit 8–10% above baseline and have held there. The “Kitten Craze” is real and durable.

  • Q1 2026: overall clinical visits down ~1% (IDEXX), with canines off 2.6% and felines up 2.5% (Vetsource). Dogs are 77% of the visit mix, so the dog story wins.

  • Google searches: “puppy” is ~25% below pre-Covid; “kitten” just hit a 21-year high.

  • The forecast: combined visit growth of -2.0% to 0.0% through 2030; not the 2–3% the industry keeps penciling in. The base case doesn’t return to growth until ~2030.

  • Vet service inflation is up 51.4% since Dec 2019 vs. 28.5% CPI and still ran 5.5% YoY this April.

Catalyst Council Report
7.65MB ∙ PDF file
Download
Download

Why you should care

According to the report, the industry has spent four years treating a structural decline like a cyclical dip just waiting for a recovery the demographics won't deliver. The visits aren't paused. A smaller population of dogs is already here. The opportunity isn't in willing the puppies back; it's in the cat clients you're not seeing, the visits you're not converting, and the value per visit you're underplaying. Same owners, different patients.

Beyond the Branch

Intriguing news from outside the veterinary industry

You can’t create 18-year-olds”: higher ed hits its own cohort wall

If the Puppocalypse is demographics-is-destiny in a vet clinic, the college enrollment cliff is the same math in a lecture hall. And it starts this fall.

The setup is almost identical. The babies not born during the 2008 recession are the freshmen not arriving in 2026. Colleges have known the number for 18 years and still mostly planned around a recovery that the birth certificates say isn’t coming.

The numbers:

  • The 18-year-old population drops about 12% between 2025 and 2030, and may never top 4 million again this century.

  • The Federal Reserve’s worse scenarios put up to 80 college closures by 2029.

  • It’s not uniform: elite schools could see 14% more demand by 2029 while small tuition-dependent and community colleges take the hit.

  • Bloomberg traced it straight to the falling birth rate. One administrator’s line says it all: "You can't create 18-year-olds."

Why you should care

Every industry eventually meets the cohort it didn't get. Higher ed is just hitting its wall a few years ahead of vet med, with the same excuse on the way down: we thought it was cyclical. It wasn't. The lesson isn't to panic about the number you can't change. It's to win a bigger share of the one you've got, and to stop pricing your plans off a generation that was never born.

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Pacific Veterinary Conference (PacVet); Sacramento, California
June 18–21, 2026

AVMA Convention 2026; Anaheim, California
July 10–14, 2026

WVC Nashville; Nashville, Tennessee
August 15–18, 2026

KC Animal Health Corridor Summit; Kansas City, Missouri
August 31–September 1, 2026

Pawsitive Intelligence One-Day AI Summit: Reno, NV
September 9, 2026
🎉 Use code TheBirdBath100 for $100 off conference registration

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]]><![CDATA[The Bird Bath: Second week of June 2026]]>https://thebirdbathvet.substack.com/p/the-bird-bath-second-week-of-june-8dfhttps://thebirdbathvet.substack.com/p/the-bird-bath-second-week-of-june-8dfThu, 11 Jun 2026 14:02:44 GMT

Dive In

Stories that deserve an extra look

First, what’s actually ending? Grad PLUS, a federal loan program that’s been around since 2006, lets grad and professional students borrow all the way up to their school’s full cost of attendance, minus any other aid. No hard underwriting, a fixed rate, federal protections, and income-driven repayment built in. For two decades it’s been the quiet backstop that made a $250K degree financeable entirely through the government. That’s what goes away.

What replaces it, starting July 1:

  • Grad PLUS gone for new borrowers. The full-cost federal backstop disappears.

  • New ceiling: $50K/year, $200K lifetime for vet, med, dental, and 8 other professional degrees.

  • Most DVM programs run well past $50K/year all-in. dvm360 just mapped the gap; AVMA’s flagging the July 1 switch.

  • The shortfall moves to private loans: 3–16% vs the 8.94% fixed Grad PLUS, co-signers, fewer protections, and lenders who can say no.

Easy to file this under “student problem.” It’s not. It’s a supply-side ownership story, and The Bird Bath Terminal makes that concrete:

  • We track 33,575 brick-and-mortar US practices. About 68% are still independent.

  • Every one needs a next owner eventually. That buyer has either been a vet willing to take on debt to buy in or a corporate group.

  • Cap the loans and you thin the buyer pool that keeps that 68% independent. Corporate already owns 31% (Banfield, VCA, NVA, VetCor, Mission lead the board), and a group with capital doesn’t need a federal loan to write the check.

So the real question: ten years out, when today’s independent owners retire, who’s standing there to buy them? July 1 makes it a little less likely to be the next generation of vets.

Why you should care

If you own a practice and someday want to sell it independently, your most natural buyer is a younger vet who finances the deal with debt. This rule quietly shrinks that buyer's borrowing power right as your exit approaches. If you're an associate dreaming of ownership, the on-ramp just got steeper and more expensive. And if you're a corporate group, this is a tailwind you didn't have to lift a finger for. None of it changes overnight. But the financing that built a generation of independent owners is being rewritten, and the effects compound for a decade.

Beyond the Branch

Intriguing news from outside the veterinary industry

Yay soccer! Now, will it actually be as big as they say?

The World Cup lands on US soil this week for the first time since ‘94. 11 host cities. A million-plus fans flying in. Vuvuzelas in the Uber line. It’s going to be wild, maybe.

And the projections are appropriately bonkers:

  • $30B+ in US economic activity, 185,000 jobs, per FIFA.

  • 1.24M international visitors.

  • Atlanta swears its 8 matches alone are worth a billion.

Sounds amazing. Here’s the catch the sports economists keep trying to tell everyone: these numbers are almost always a hype machine. Their words for the pre-event math are basically “a promotional press release.” Tickets are so pricey there’s less left to spend on hot dogs and a sponsored Coke. And Seattle flight bookings are actually down 20% — turns out plenty of locals would rather flee the chaos than host it.

The unsexy truth: mega-events mostly shuffle money around. The bar by the stadium prints money. The city, once it pays for cops and traffic, basically breaks even. Still fun. Just not the windfall the brochure promised.

Why you should care

This is really a stated-vs-revealed-preference story. Every giant projection is built on what people say they'll do: fly in, fill the hotels, and spend like crazy.
What they actually do is messier: locals book flights out, fans balk at $40 beers, and the windfall shrinks. The gap between the survey and the paper is where the truth lives. You see the same thing in your exam rooms every day. Clients say they'd do anything for their pet, then the estimate hits the counter, and behavior tells the real story.

Read what people do, not what they say they'll do, in a stadium economy or a treatment plan.

Featured Events

Explore our Full List of Conferences

ACVIM Forum; Seattle, Washington
June 10–13, 2026

Pacific Veterinary Conference (PacVet); Sacramento, California
June 18–21, 2026

AVMA Convention 2026; Anaheim, California
July 10–14, 2026

WVC Nashville; Nashville, Tennessee
August 15–18, 2026

KC Animal Health Corridor Summit; Kansas City, Missouri
August 31–September 1, 2026

Pawsitive Intelligence One-Day AI Summit: Reno, NV
September 9, 2026
🎉 Use code TheBirdBath100 for $100 off conference registration

Thanks for reading The Bird Bath! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

]]><![CDATA[The Bird Bath: First week of June 2026]]>https://thebirdbathvet.substack.com/p/the-bird-bath-first-week-of-june-df4https://thebirdbathvet.substack.com/p/the-bird-bath-first-week-of-june-df4Thu, 04 Jun 2026 14:56:46 GMT

Dive In

Stories that deserve an extra look

A new study says your clients want ethical, sustainable pet food. It also says they won’t pay for it.

Researchers at Colorado State and LSU surveyed 1,066 U.S. pet owners on what drives their food choices. The values are huge, but their wallet is tiny.

The numbers:

  • 81% rank animal welfare as very or extremely important. 70% say the same about environmental sustainability.

  • But cost is the limiter: 67% name it the top barrier to sustainable options, 57% to welfare-conscious ones.

  • 62% had no idea third-party certifications even exist, and once told, 65% of them said they’d use one.

  • 76% trust their veterinarian to guide animal welfare standards, more than any other source.

So owners care, can’t afford to act on it, don’t know what the labels mean, and are quietly waiting for someone they trust to tell them what to buy.

That someone is sitting in the exam room. From the authors: “As trusted advisors, veterinarians are well-positioned to guide pet owners toward more sustainable and welfare-conscious feeding choices.”

Why you should care

Marketing and retailing decisions are based on stated preferences. The study is a reminder that revealed preferences win. People buy what they can afford and what someone they trust tells them to. The interesting part isn’t the gap between values and wallet; it’s that owners are openly pointing to the vet as the voice they trust most on this, more than any label or brand. That’s a rare thing to have handed to you.

Most pet food marketing spends millions trying to manufacture the trust a veterinarian already walks into the room with. The brands and retailers chasing the “humane, sustainable” premium are fighting price resistance and certification confusion. The exam room doesn’t have either problem.

Beyond the Branch

Intriguing news from outside the veterinary industry

There’s no “average” American consumer anymore. There’s the top of the K and the bottom of it.

The data is now overwhelming. Through March 2026, real spending growth split cleanly by income:

  • Households over $125K: up ~7.6%.

  • Middle income: ~3%.

  • Under $40K: barely over 1%.

The top is investing in wellness, experiences, and education. The bottom is reallocating toward groceries, utilities, and gas. BofA is even calling it an “E-shape” now, with the middle class quietly peeling away from the bottom too. (yay! a new econ term to sling around)

It’s the exact same story as the pet food aisle, just zoomed out. One group buys on values. The other buys on price. Same product, two completely different customers.

Why you should care

Every consumer business in America is quietly becoming two businesses, and the pet industry isn't exempt. There is no median pet owner to market to anymore.

One arm of the K is buying memberships, wellness plans, and premium food on values. The other is trading down to the store brand and asking about payment plans.

The reason spectrum-of-care pricing and value tiers keep showing up everywhere isn't a trend; it's both arms of the K walking into the same lobby. The winners will either pick an arm and build for it or get genuinely good at serving both without pretending they're the same customer.

Featured Events

Explore our Full List of Conferences

ACVIM Forum; Seattle, Washington
June 10–13, 2026

Pacific Veterinary Conference (PacVet); Sacramento, California
June 18–21, 2026

AVMA Convention 2026; Anaheim, California
July 10–14, 2026

WVC Nashville; Nashville, Tennessee
August 15–18, 2026

KC Animal Health Corridor Summit; Kansas City, Missouri
August 31–September 1, 2026

Pawsitive Intelligence One-Day AI Summit: Reno, NV
September 9, 2026
🎉 Use code TheBirdBath100 for $100 off conference registration

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]]><![CDATA[The Bird Bath: Last week of May 2026]]>https://thebirdbathvet.substack.com/p/the-bird-bath-last-week-of-may-2026https://thebirdbathvet.substack.com/p/the-bird-bath-last-week-of-may-2026Thu, 28 May 2026 15:57:22 GMT

Dive In

Stories that deserve an extra look

UK-listed CVS Group plc, five hundred-ish hospitals across the UK, Ireland, the Netherlands, and Australia, announced a £350M bank-debt refinancing with the maturity pushed from February 2028 to May 2030. The market liked it. The stock popped 6.84% on the day.

The deal itself is interesting, but the strategy behind the numbers is the really important part.

The structure:

  • £125M term loan + £225M revolving credit facility + £5M overdraft

  • Maturity extended two-plus years to May 2030

  • Refi alongside a fresh £50M share buyback program, on top of an external recommendation earlier in May to pursue a £100M buyback, citing share undervaluation

The capital allocation, in CEO Richard Fairman’s own words: “additional flexibility and firepower to launch a meaningful share buyback programme, alongside disciplined capital allocation.” Translation:

  • ~£50M/year for Australia M&A. Already closed a single-site Sydney companion clinic (AUS$8.2M / £4M). The second Sydney site is in motion at AUS$3.2M / £1.7M. The Australia thesis is now fully funded.

  • ~£30M/year organic growth including clinical facilities, equipment, technology, and employee retention.

  • £50M buyback, running in parallel.

  • Full-year trading update July 23.

And quietly underneath all of it: Fairman announced his retirement in March. CEO succession search is at “early stages.” So this is a refinancing, an offensive capital plan, and a setup for whoever comes next.

Now back up and look at what CVS is actually telling the public market. The UK CMA’s competition probe into UK vet med is still grinding through remedies. Mars/IVC/Linnaeus have been the headline names. CVS is a named party too. And in the middle of that regulatory weather, CVS just:

  • Locked in financing through 2030

  • Said “we are going to keep buying” outside the UK

  • Started buying back its own stock

  • Signaled the platform is cash-generative enough to do all three at once

This is the chess board US groups will be staring at next. NVA is staffing up for an IPO with a public-company CFO. IVC Evidensia is queued for a London listing. Mission Pet Health is being built for the cycle after. The CVS update is essentially the first walk-through of how a listed vet operator manages the next 36 months: pick a non-domestic growth lane, return capital, ride out the regulatory cycle without flinching, and let the buyback do the talking.

A few things worth watching from here:

  • The Australia thesis. £50M/year is a real check, even by US standards. The Australian market is fragmented, English-speaking, regulatorily friendlier, and increasingly on every consolidator’s whiteboard. US groups (Aurora Animal Hospitals, VetPartners-via-OMERS, NVA Australia) are already there. The room is going to get tighter.

  • The “buyback over UK M&A” signal. CVS chose to return capital domestically rather than fight for UK consolidation share. That is a verdict on the post-CMA UK roll-up math.

  • The succession. Whoever replaces Fairman inherits a £350M warchest, a working international playbook, and a board that just publicly endorsed share repurchases. The job is bigger than it looks.

  • What it means for US comp tables. CVS trades on the LSE at a multiple every US private vet platform secretly benchmarks against. Refi + buyback + organic + measured M&A equals the multiple. Skip any of it and the multiple compresses.

Why you should care

Last week, we highlighted the future of IPOs in vet med and beyond. Now we’re seeing the visibilty a public company brings to the market. After years of uncertainty from the CMA investigation, practice acquistions and divestitures, and restructuring, the market is showing what the next phase is for public companies when regulators intervene.

Beyond the Branch

Intriguing news from outside the veterinary industry

Cava and Sweetgreen Reported the Same Quarter. They Look Nothing Alike.

Same category. Same retail-format pitch. Same “we are a brand that does food” investor deck. Q1 2026 results say two completely different things.

  • CAVA: revenue +32.2% YoY. Same-restaurant sales +9.7%. Traffic +6.8%. 20 net new units. Restaurant-level margin 25.1%. 459 total locations, up 20.2% YoY.

  • Sweetgreen: traffic -11.2%. Just 4 net new openings (vs. 5 prior year). The headline net income figure of $125.8M was almost entirely a one-time $160.6M gain on the Spyce sale — the AI robotics unit they bought to fix kitchen unit economics and then quietly sold for parts.

  • Chipotle clawed back to just 0.6% traffic growth after four straight declining quarters.

Three brands. Same retail-format thesis. Cava is compounding. Sweetgreen is contracting. Chipotle is flat.

Why you should care

Every de novo vet brand right now thinks it’s Cava. Some of them are. Some are Sweetgreen. A couple are Spyce — bolt-ons whose math never worked and who will get sold for parts inside a bigger story. The format does not save you. The unit economics do.

  • Independent practice owners: the buyer you sell to is benchmarking your numbers against the Cava end of this curve, not the Sweetgreen one. Same-site comps matter more than total count.

  • Corporate operators: watch which de novo cohort metrics flatten in Q2 — traffic, revenue per visit, new-site IRR. That is where the Sweetgreens reveal themselves.

  • Capital / PE: the public comps you actually price against are not other vet groups. They are retail-format service brands. Cava trades at a multiple Sweetgreen would kill for, and the only reason is unit economics.

  • General: a brand wins by being the same store, twice. Then by being a great store, ten times. The de novo cohort is in the second test right now.

Featured Events

Explore our Full List of Conferences

UC Davis Veterinary Conference – AggieVET; Davis, California
May 30–31, 2026

ACVIM Forum; Seattle, Washington
June 10–13, 2026

Pacific Veterinary Conference (PacVet); Sacramento, California
June 18–21, 2026

AVMA Convention 2026; Anaheim, California
July 10–14, 2026

WVC Nashville; Nashville, Tennessee
August 15–18, 2026

KC Animal Health Corridor Summit; Kansas City, Missouri
August 31–September 1, 2026

Pawsitive Intelligence One-Day AI Summit: Reno, NV
September 9, 2026
🎉 Use code TheBirdBath100 for $100 off conference registration

Thanks for reading The Bird Bath! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

]]><![CDATA[The Bird Bath: Third week of May 2026]]>https://thebirdbathvet.substack.com/p/the-bird-bath-third-week-of-may-2026https://thebirdbathvet.substack.com/p/the-bird-bath-third-week-of-may-2026Thu, 21 May 2026 14:01:24 GMT

Dive In

Stories that deserve an extra look

The mega-IPO wave is real. Vet med is already in it.

Three things happened in the last seven days that changed the math for every PE-backed vet platform in the world.

1. SpaceX filed. S-1 dropped Wednesday. Ticker SPCX, Nasdaq, ~$1.75T valuation, up to $75B raise. Largest IPO ever attempted. The filing also confirmed Anthropic is paying SpaceX $1.25B/month through May 2029 for compute. That’s $45B locked in.

2. OpenAI and Anthropic are right behind.

  • OpenAI: confidential filing this week, Goldman + Morgan Stanley, target >$1T, fall debut.

  • Anthropic: in talks to raise $50B at $900B, IPO as early as October.

  • Together, the three of them will pull 4.5x the average annual IPO capital raised since 2000 in a six-month window.

3. The S&P 500 is rewriting its rulebook to let them in early. S&P DJI is proposing to cut the seasoning rule from 12 months to 6 months and to drop the four-quarters-of-profitability requirement for mega-caps. The consultation closes May 28. Implementation could hit June 8. If it passes, SpaceX could be in the S&P 500 by year-end. Every index fund and 401(k) becomes a forced buyer.

4. OpenAI and Anthropic just told the pre-IPO market its shares aren’t real. Last week, both companies updated investor policy to declare that any share transfer without board approval is “void” — not “voidable,” void. Under Delaware law, that’s the nuclear option: the transaction is treated as never having occurred. Anthropic published a literal blocklist of secondary platforms (Forge, Hiive, Sydecar, Upmarket, others). Tokenized OpenAI and Anthropic shares crashed ~40% in 24 hours, from $1,400 to $900 on PreStocks.

Translation: every share is going to be issued, allocated, and priced through the official offering. No backdoor liquidity. No SPV workarounds. Bottle the demand up, force it into the IPO window, watch the book over-subscribe.

That’s the slipstream. Trillion-dollar names sucking in capital, locking out secondary leakage, redefining what “ready for public markets” even means, and pulling the seasoning window in half.

How real companies position around a wave like this

You don’t fight it. You ride it. The playbook everyone uses:

  • Don’t share the roadshow weeks. Nobody wants to compete with Musk on CNBC. Smaller issuers slide into the gaps before or after.

  • Pre-position. Preserve optionality. File confidentially. Get the S-1 ready, the board built, the audit clean. So when the mega trades up in aftermarket, you launch inside two weeks.

  • Borrow the signal. A successful mega-IPO is a green light for the next tier. If SpaceX prices well and trades up, every services platform in the world accelerates its prep.

  • Control the cap table going in. OpenAI and Anthropic just demonstrated the modern playbook: shut down secondary trading, void unauthorized transfers, force every dollar of demand into the official book. Tight cap table = bigger pop.

  • Have a sponsor who’s done this before. Silver Lake. KKR. Hellman & Friedman. They sequence portfolio exits like a chess opening.

Which brings us to vet med.

Silver Lake is on both sides of this cycle. Watch them.

The vet IPO conversation is now three names deep, and the through-line is one fund.

IVC Evidensia. EQT, Silver Lake, and Nestlé. Valued at $13B+ in 2021, earnings nearly doubled since. EQT is openly preparing a multibillion London listing. Only gate: the UK CMA’s final report, due later this year. The minute that lands clean, IVC moves.

NVA. JAB-backed, ~1,400 hospitals, tripled since 2019. Already split into two operating businesses (the textbook IPO setup), already adding to its IPO team (covered in the April 30 issue). 2027, most likely, but the new world of IPOs could throw timelines out the window.

Mission Pet Health. This is where it gets interesting. The SVP + MVP merger closed in December 2024 with $4B of new equity, split between Shore Capital and Silver Lake. 900+ locations, comparable in scale to NVA and within sight of Mars’ Banfield/VCA. Currently paying top multiples to acquire top practices.

Mission is not this cycle’s IPO. Mission is the platform Silver Lake is building to be the next cycle’s IPO — funded in part by the liquidity Silver Lake is about to harvest from IVC.

Same fund. Two stages. One playbook.

Why you should care

If you’re an independent owner: The buyers who price for an IPO buy differently. They pay more, they close faster, they want clean books and a clean story. The Mission Pet Health bid you get in 2026 is fundamentally not the same instrument as the one you would have gotten in 2024. Same logo, different math.

If you’re a corporate operator: Public-company comps are coming. IVC’s London tape will price EBITDA quality, same-store growth, DVM retention, AI deployment — and the market will see it. Every PE-backed platform gets benchmarked against that print, whether they want to be or not.

If you’re capital: The signal to watch isn’t SpaceX’s first-day pop. It’s whether the S&P seasoning rule actually passes on May 28. If it does, the entire timeline for every IPO-track company in the world compresses by six months. Vet med included.

Featured Events

Explore our Full List of Conferences

UC Davis Veterinary Conference – AggieVET; Davis, California
May 30–31, 2026

ACVIM Forum; Seattle, Washington
June 10–13, 2026

Pacific Veterinary Conference (PacVet); Sacramento, California
June 18–21, 2026

AVMA Convention 2026; Anaheim, California
July 10–14, 2026

WVC Nashville; Nashville, Tennessee
August 15–18, 2026

KC Animal Health Corridor Summit; Kansas City, Missouri
August 31–September 1, 2026

Pawsitive Intelligence One-Day AI Summit: Reno, NV
September 9, 2026
🎉 Use code TheBirdBath100 for $100 off conference registration

Thanks for reading The Bird Bath! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

]]><![CDATA[The Bird Bath: Second week of May 2026]]>https://thebirdbathvet.substack.com/p/the-bird-bath-second-week-of-may-5d7https://thebirdbathvet.substack.com/p/the-bird-bath-second-week-of-may-5d7Thu, 14 May 2026 14:03:04 GMT

Dive In

Stories that deserve an extra look

The New World screwworm has crossed into the two Mexican states that border Texas. As of May 12, the AVMA confirmed the northernmost active case sits 62 miles south of the US line in Nuevo León. The fly was eradicated from the US in 1966. It’s been gone for a generation. It’s not gone anymore.

The numbers Mexico is sitting on right now:

  • 1,717 active cases across Mexico (SENASICA, early May)

  • 206 active cases in the border states of Nuevo León and Tamaulipas (USDA, May 9)

  • Species breakdown: 913 cattle, 455 dogs, 136 swine, 88 horses and one confirmed cat in Tamaulipas since May 1

  • First wild-animal death from NWS myiasis confirmed in Mexico: an endangered howler monkey in Chiapas

The US response, all of it stood up in the last 10 months:

  • Southern livestock ports closed since July 9, 2025

  • Sterile fly dispersal facility at Moore AFB in Edinburg, TX — operational February 2026

  • New sterile fly production facility — groundbreaking April 17

  • Target capacity: 100M sterile flies/week by Nov 2027, 300M/week by 2028

  • 5 FDA emergency-use authorizations for animal drugs since November 2025 (Credelio, Credelio CAT, Ivomec, NexGard, NexGard COMBO)

  • USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins this week announced the $100M NWS Grand Challenge funding pool to accelerate sterile fly production and response

“This is now the northernmost active case in Mexico, and that puts Texas squarely in the crosshairs.”- Texas Ag Commissioner Sid Miller

“Pets from Mexico are still allowed to enter the United States with very limited oversight.” - Dr. Peter Mundschenk, Immediate Past President, USAHA

Trade is locked down. Tourists with dogs are not.

A 70-year-old biotech (sterile insect technique of releasing irradiated males at scale, the world’s first and most successful gene-tech eradication program) is being rebuilt from scratch in 2026. Full capacity arrives in 2028. The fly is moving now.

Why you should care

  • If you’re a TX/NM/AZ small-animal practice: you are the frontline. Daily wound checks become the new tick check. Familiarize your team with NWS myiasis presentation before a Tijuana rescue dog walks through the door.

  • If you’re a mixed or large-animal practice: review the 5 EUA drugs and your sourcing. Talk to county extension about reporting workflow.

  • If you’re corporate/PE: this is a regional risk concentration story. TX is your single biggest practice market and your biggest cattle market. Map exposure.

  • If you’re a supplier: the FDA has issued 5 EUAs in 6 months. That velocity is the story. Build for it.

The general read: the biggest animal-health story of 2026 isn’t a deal or an earnings beat; it’s a hungry fly. Vet med is about to be reminded that biosecurity is the floor under every other line of business.

Beyond the Branch

Intriguing news from outside the veterinary industry

On May 2, the WHO was notified of a cluster of severe acute respiratory illness on the MV Hondius, a cruise ship in the Atlantic. By May 6 the agent was confirmed: Andes virus, a hantavirus normally carried by rodents in South America’s Patagonia region — and one of the only hantaviruses with documented person-to-person spread.

The state of play:

  • 8 cases (6 confirmed, 2 suspected), 3 deaths as of May 8

  • All passengers evacuated and the ship cleared Tenerife on May 11

  • CDC: US public health risk “extremely low”

  • No vector required. The ship was the vector.

Why it’s on this page: this is the same shape as the screwworm story at a different scale. A pathogen that lived in a specific animal in a specific geography found a corridor — a ship, a tourist, a pet — and started moving. Containment held this time because the case load was small and the boat was finite. Screwworm doesn’t have those constraints.

Why you should care

Every zoonotic story is a vet med story before it's a human medicine story. The profession that catches the first dog with screwworm and the first cat with H5N1 isn't a passive observer of public health.
With the continual drive for One Health initiatives, our industry is a frontline for assessing and containing outbreaks that can overturn the daily flow of life.

Featured Events

Explore our Full List of Conferences

UC Davis Veterinary Conference – AggieVET; Davis, California
May 30–31, 2026

ACVIM Forum; Seattle, Washington
June 10–13, 2026

Pacific Veterinary Conference (PacVet); Sacramento, California
June 18–21, 2026

AVMA Convention 2026; Anaheim, California
July 10–14, 2026

WVC Nashville; Nashville, Tennessee
August 15–18, 2026

KC Animal Health Corridor Summit; Kansas City, Missouri
August 31–September 1, 2026

Pawsitive Intelligence One-Day AI Summit: Reno, NV
September 9, 2026
🎉 Use code TheBirdBath100 for $100 off conference registration

Thanks for reading The Bird Bath! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

]]><![CDATA[The Bird Bath: First week of May 2026]]>https://thebirdbathvet.substack.com/p/the-bird-bath-first-week-of-may-2026https://thebirdbathvet.substack.com/p/the-bird-bath-first-week-of-may-2026Thu, 07 May 2026 16:47:38 GMT

Dive In

Stories that deserve an extra look

The two companies that share most of the same waiting rooms reported earnings 48 hours apart. You’d expect their P&Ls to look at the same, but they’re on different planets.

IDEXX — Q1 2026 (reported May 5)

  • Revenue $1.14B, +14% reported / +11% organic. Consensus beat.

  • EPS $3.47, up 17% YoY. Beat consensus by $0.06.

  • Gross margin expanded to 63.4% from 62.4%. Operating margin +100 bps on a comparable basis.

  • 4,650 premium instruments placed (vs. 4,163 a year ago). 1,099 inVue Dx placements. 1,360 Catalyst. 1,430 hematology.

  • US clinical visits were down ~2.1% in the quarter. IDEXX still posted ~12% CAG organic. Read that line twice.

  • Guide raised: revenue to $4.68–$4.76B, EPS to $14.45–$14.90, CAG Dx recurring organic growth to ~9.7% midpoint.

Zoetis — Q1 2026 (reported May 7)

  • Revenue $2.26B, +3% reported, flat organic. Missed consensus.

  • Adjusted EPS $1.53 vs. $1.60 consensus. Missed target.

  • Gross margin dropped to 71.7% from 83.2% a year ago. That is 1,150 basis points of compression in 12 months.

  • US sales -8% organic. US companion animal -11%. We’re wearing out the “-” sign.

  • Named in the release: generic pressure on Convenia and Cerenia. Heightened competitive pressure on Simparica Trio.

  • Guide cut across the board: revenue $9.68–$9.96B (down from $9.83–$10.03B), adj. EPS $6.85–$7.00 (down from $7.00–$7.10).

  • The bright spot: production animal +7% organic. Cattle parasiticides got a boost from New World screwworm response. Poultry vaccine sales rode disease-outbreak activity. Swine recovered on antibiotic supply.

One company expanded margin while visits declined. The other watched its biggest companion-animal portfolio directly in the crosshairs of generics in real time.

Why you should care

  • Diagnostics decoupled from visit volume. US visits down 2.1%. IDEXX CAG diagnostics +11%. That’s price plus utilization plus share, not market growth. The toll booth prints even when traffic dips.

  • The 2028 problem. The optimistic Zoetis bull case is “the new innovation pipeline shows up in 2028.” Investors have to underwrite seven more quarters of competitive damage before the pivot lands. That is a long time to battle generics.

  • The multiple gap is the tell. Piper Sandler’s David Westenberg rates both Neutral. IDXX trades at ~46x forward. ZTS trades at ~19x. The market stopped pricing animal health as one bucket. It is now pricing diagnostics as a quality compounder and pharma as a defensive cyclical.

  • Watch what Zoetis buys next. They already paid up for Veterinary Pathology Group last year. A $50B-cap company cannot ride a softening companion-animal pharma franchise into 2028 without doing something.

Beyond the Branch

Intriguing news from outside the veterinary industry

Two papers landed in the last ten days. They are the same story at different scales.

  • NPR / OpenAI real-world study (Apr. 30): an AI model out-diagnosed a large physician baseline in real-world patient cases. Not a sandbox.

  • Mayo Clinic, in Gut (Apr. 28): Mayo’s REDMOD model, trained on routine abdominal CT scans, flagged pancreatic cancer up to 3 years before diagnosis, catching 73% of pre-diagnostic cases at a median 16 months out. Radiologists without AI: 39%. The scans were taken for unrelated reasons. The signal was already in the data. Nobody could see it.

The shift isn’t AI replacing the clinician. It is AI extracting value from imaging and lab data nobody knew was there. Diagnostics keeps eating the value chain because diagnostics is where the latent signal lives.

Why you should care

  • Practice owners and corporate ops: the “who reads the result” job is changing right now in human medicine. It will change in vet medicine next, with a lag. Practices that own their diagnostic data and their AI integrations get to charge for interpretation.

  • Vet diagnostic vendors: the platform with the most data and the cleanest AI hooks wins. The inVue Dx placements and the reference-lab footprint look very different through this lens.

  • Investors: the gross-margin gap between IDXX and ZTS this quarter is a snapshot of a longer trend. Diagnostics with AI on top is a multi-year compounder. Drugs facing generics with a 2028 pipeline catalyst is a waiting game.

  • General takeaway: if you bet on diagnostics in human medicine 10 years ago, you won. The same trade is teeing up in animal health now. Pay attention to who is building the data infrastructure, not who is running the loudest commercials.

Featured Events

Explore our Full List of Conferences

Best Friends National Conference; Salt Lake City, Utah
May 7–9, 2026

UC Davis Veterinary Conference – AggieVET; Davis, California
May 30–31, 2026

ACVIM Forum; Seattle, Washington
June 10–13, 2026

Pacific Veterinary Conference (PacVet); Sacramento, California
June 18–21, 2026

AVMA Convention 2026; Anaheim, California
July 10–14, 2026

WVC Nashville; Nashville, Tennessee
August 15–18, 2026

KC Animal Health Corridor Summit; Kansas City, Missouri
August 31–September 1, 2026

Pawsitive Intelligence One-Day AI Summit: Reno, NV
September 9, 2026
🎉 Use code TheBirdBath100 for $100 off conference registration

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]]><![CDATA[The Bird Bath: Last week of April 2026]]>https://thebirdbathvet.substack.com/p/the-bird-bath-last-week-of-april-1d2https://thebirdbathvet.substack.com/p/the-bird-bath-last-week-of-april-1d2Thu, 30 Apr 2026 14:01:38 GMT

Dive In

Stories that deserve an extra look

FWD People just dropped the 2025 Trust Gap Study; 103 vets, 150+ pet parents, and 28 pages of “I don’t think so, buddy."

The headline numbers:

  • 80% of pet parents research before walking in

  • 96% of vets say clients are more influenced by online communities than a year ago

  • 79% say clients are more likely to second-guess advice

  • 71% are actively fighting misinformation in the exam room

  • 67% of pet parents arrive expecting or requesting specific treatments

  • Only 34% are asking more informed questions. The rest are just louder.

One associate vet, quoted:

“We are competing with influencers, deceptive marketing, and Dr. Google to earn a client’s trust. Many don’t even want to trust us — they just want us to confirm their preconceptions.”

The core argument: the vet’s role has flipped from authority to advisor. 68% of vets already see it. Diagnosis, treatment, and purchase used to be a straight line. Now it’s a checkpoint where clients validate the research they already did on TikTok.

What pet parents actually want most: empathy (99%), clear explanations (98%), and cost transparency (90%). Digital tools? 53%, way down the list.

The good news: 88% still trust their vet. Not dethroned, just demoted from “the source” to “one source.”

The Gen Z kicker (via APPA): They’re the only generation growing in pet ownership, with the most multi-pet households, and they visit the vet more often than anyone else. The next gen of clients is loyal, but if you don’t show up for them, someone with a ring light will. 👉 Download the full report

Why you should care

The exam room isn’t losing trust. It’s losing its monopoly. 88% of pet parents still trust their vet, but the vet is now one voice in a chorus that includes TikTok, Reddit, ChatGPT, and the friend with strong opinions about kibble. That doesn’t kill the practice. It kills the playbook. The clinics, corporations, and brands that win the next decade will be the ones that stop performing authority and start practicing empathy out loud, on camera, and at the kitchen table where the decision actually gets made.

Beyond the Branch

Intriguing news from outside the veterinary industry

If the FWD report felt local, the 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer Special Report on Health zooms out and says, "Yeah, this is everywhere.” 16,000 people across 16 countries. The findings are jaw-dropping.

  • 70% of people globally now believe at least one “divisive” health claim, such as that vaccines are used for population control, that fluoride is harmful, that pasteurization isn’t safe, etc.

  • 64% believe an AI-fluent layperson can match or beat a doctor on at least one health task

  • Confidence in personal health decision-making dropped 10 points year-over-year to just 51%

  • People are now more likely to turn to uncredentialed sources than experts for diet, nutrition, vitamins, and supplements

  • 79% of 18–34-year-olds hold a divisive belief vs 60% of 55+

  • The kicker: people who hold these beliefs consume 2–3x more health content than skeptics. They’re not under-informed. They’re overinformed by the wrong sources and 3x more likely to disregard their provider’s guidance.

In other words, the cure for misinformation is not more information.
👉 Download the Global report

Why you should care

Vet med is not the outlier here. It’s running the same play human medicine is running, about 18 months behind. Same dynamic, same demographics, same fix: empathy beats expertise, presence beats authority, and the professionals who keep saying “but I went to school for this” are losing ground to the ones who learn how to actually show up where their clients already are. The whole care economy is being re-platformed in real time. Vets, brands, and corporates who treat this as a marketing problem will lose to the ones who treat it as a relationship problem.

Featured Events

Explore our Full List of Conferences

Recognizing Thoracic Emergencies: Imaging Lessons from Real Cases
May 6, 2026, 8 PM ET, Virtual 🖥️
Presented by Radimal
Register here ✍️

Best Friends National Conference; Salt Lake City, Utah
May 7–9, 2026

UC Davis Veterinary Conference – AggieVET; Davis, California
May 30–31, 2026

ACVIM Forum; Seattle, Washington
June 10–13, 2026

Pacific Veterinary Conference (PacVet); Sacramento, California
June 18–21, 2026

AVMA Convention 2026; Anaheim, California
July 10–14, 2026

WVC Nashville; Nashville, Tennessee
August 15–18, 2026

KC Animal Health Corridor Summit; Kansas City, Missouri
August 31–September 1, 2026

Thanks for reading The Bird Bath! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

]]><![CDATA[The Bird Bath: Fourth week of April 2026]]>https://thebirdbathvet.substack.com/p/the-bird-bath-fourth-week-of-april-32ahttps://thebirdbathvet.substack.com/p/the-bird-bath-fourth-week-of-april-32aThu, 23 Apr 2026 14:03:05 GMT

Listen Now

Dive In

Stories that deserve an extra look

For years I’ve been running on gut. You probably have too. “The South is getting rolled up.” “Independents are dying.” “Corporate has the DVMs.” “Texas and Florida are the consolidation heat map.” I built The Bird Bath Terminal because I was tired of guessing. Now I can actually look.

Here’s what the data says, as of this week:

  • 37,072 active US practices. 34% corporate, 66% independent.

  • Most consolidated state? Massachusetts. 49% corporate-owned. Then North Carolina (46%), New Hampshire (46%), Arizona (45%), Virginia (43%). Florida is 6th. Texas isn’t in the top 10.

  • Least consolidated? South Dakota (4%), North Dakota (5%), Wyoming (11%), Montana (12%). Plains states are basically greenfield.

  • DVM count: 89,318 tracked. Independents employ 53,136 of them. Corporate employs 36,182. The “corporate owns the doctors” narrative is upside down.

  • Average corporate location: 3.8 DVMs. Average independent: 2.7. One doctor of difference.

  • 2,625 independent practices have 5+ DVMs. Big indie is alive and well. Nobody’s counting them because nobody had the list.

  • Chicago is 56% corporate. Austin is 51%. Two metros past the “rolled up” tipping point.

Why you should care

If you’re a corporate group, your next 100 locations are not in Texas. They’re in the upper Midwest and the Mountain West, where competition hasn’t shown up yet.

If you’re an independent, you are not alone and you are not a unicorn. There are thousands of you, and you employ more vets than every corporate group combined.

If you’re PE, the “consolidation runway” line is getting harder to say with a straight face in MA and NC. It’s an early chapter everywhere else.

Gut is fine. Data is better. Both is best. 👉 Get inside the Terminal

Beyond the Branch

Intriguing news from outside the veterinary industry

Zillow and Redfin spent this month in an open street fight about whose data is real.

Redfin published research claiming pre-marketing listings (Compass-style “coming soon” pockets) could grow inventory 6–12%. Zillow’s chief economist went public calling the research a mischaracterization of Zillow’s own survey data. Redfin shrugged and said the math is transparent, go stress test it yourself.

Behind the feud: Zillow told agents in late 2025 that any listing marketed off-MLS for 24+ hours could get the listing (and the agent) banned. Compass answered by partnering with Redfin and Rocket to syndicate 500,000+ private listings straight around Zillow.

Three data companies, three versions of the truth, and the consumer stuck in the middle trying to figure out which app actually shows them every home.

Why you should care

Every agent in that fight is a small business owner watching two tech platforms decide how their listing gets seen. Swap “agent” for “practice owner” and it’s the same story: your Google profile, your corporate parent’s microsite, your Yelp page, your Nextdoor reviews. You don’t control any of them, and they don’t talk to each other. The winners in the next five years will be the owners who treat their own data like inventory; owned, audited, and pushed everywhere on purpose.

Featured Events

Explore our Full List of Conferences

Recognizing Thoracic Emergencies: Imaging Lessons from Real Cases
May 6, 2026, 8 PM ET, Virtual 🖥️
Presented by Radimal
Register here ✍️

Best Friends National Conference; Salt Lake City, Utah
May 7–9, 2026

UC Davis Veterinary Conference – AggieVET; Davis, California
May 30–31, 2026

ACVIM Forum; Seattle, Washington
June 10–13, 2026

Pacific Veterinary Conference (PacVet); Sacramento, California
June 18–21, 2026

AVMA Convention 2026; Anaheim, California
July 10–14, 2026

WVC Nashville; Nashville, Tennessee
August 15–18, 2026

KC Animal Health Corridor Summit; Kansas City, Missouri
August 31–September 1, 2026

Thanks for reading The Bird Bath! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

]]><![CDATA[The Bird Bath: Third week of April 2026]]>https://thebirdbathvet.substack.com/p/the-bird-bath-second-week-of-april-bf3https://thebirdbathvet.substack.com/p/the-bird-bath-second-week-of-april-bf3Thu, 16 Apr 2026 15:54:54 GMT

Listen Now

Dive In

Stories that deserve an extra look

On April 9, Amazon launched an AI-powered pet adoption matching tool in partnership with PetArmor and Best Friends Animal Society. Users type natural language prompts like “I need a low-energy dog good for apartments” and the system returns personalized matches from Best Friends’ shelter network across six US cities. A pilot at Glen Rose Animal Control in Texas produced 24 adoptions in a single day, four times the facility’s previous record.

But adoption matching is just the front door.

Last May, Amazon launched a full pet pharmacy through a fulfillment partnership with Vetsource, hundreds of prescription medications, FDA-approved, shipped in 2-6 days. Customers enter their vet’s info at checkout, Vetsource handles approval and dispensing. Refills process automatically if an active prescription is on file.

Amazon is already the No. 2 source for online pet medication purchases, according to analysts at Brakke Consulting, and those same reports say the top spot is just a matter of time. Over 9 in 10 Americans are active Amazon users.
👉 Check out the new tool

Why you should care

Chewy has played some big cards and doubled down on bringing in pharmacy revenue. Analysts liked that move, and the stock popped up after the Modern Animal acquisition announcement.
Amazon is inserting itself more into the pet ecosystem, and autoship revenue is the golden goose.

Beyond the Branch

Intriguing news from outside the veterinary industry

US drug overdose deaths have plummeted in ways public health officials have never seen. From a peak of nearly 113,000 deaths in August 2023, the 12-month count dropped to roughly 71,500 by October 2025, the longest consecutive decline on record. In Maine, no one under 25 died of an overdose for nearly a year.

But a new threat is emerging, and veterinarians will recognize it immediately.

Drug gangs are pivoting from fentanyl to cheaper compounds, and they’re pulling out the Merck Manual to do it. Medetomidine, an FDA-approved veterinary sedative used in dogs (and off-label in cats, exotics, and wildlife), is now showing up mixed with fentanyl and heroin across at least 18 states. The CDC issued a Health Alert Network notice this month warning of its spread.

The AVMA notes that FDA-approved veterinary medetomidine products have not been implicated. The illicit supply appears to come from bulk powder, first traced to Maryland in 2022. But the pattern is familiar. Xylazine (called “tranq”) went from a veterinary staple to street drug to scheduling pressure in a few years. Medetomidine could follow the same path. 👉 Read the DVM360 editorial

Why you should care

This is a huge win for the safety of communities across the country, but a solid reminder that substances, controlled or not, should always be monitored.

Featured Events

Explore our Full List of Conferences

AAVMC’s Catalyze 2026; Washington, D.C.
April 12–17, 2027

Recognizing Thoracic Emergencies: Imaging Lessons from Real Cases
May 9, 2026, 8 PM ET, Virtual 🖥️
Presented by Radimal
Register here ✍️

Best Friends National Conference; Salt Lake City, Utah
May 7–9, 2026

UC Davis Veterinary Conference – AggieVET; Davis, California
May 30–31, 2026

ACVIM Forum; Seattle, Washington
June 10–13, 2026

Pacific Veterinary Conference (PacVet); Sacramento, California
June 18–21, 2026

AVMA Convention 2026; Anaheim, California
July 10–14, 2026

WVC Nashville; Nashville, Tennessee
August 15–18, 2026

KC Animal Health Corridor Summit; Kansas City, Missouri
August 31–September 1, 2026

Thanks for reading The Bird Bath! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

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