I won't lie. Being a practice owner is hard. At no point would I promote practice ownership as an easy proposition for anyone. But—guess what?—being a veterinarian is way harder than being a practice owner. Which makes me wonder why so many people willing to put in tireless hours to crown themselves animal doctor are—once fully fledged—subsequently unwilling to take this extra step?

It's a crucial question for the future of our profession. As more veterinarians graduate with a self-described lack of interest in practice ownership and see fewer examples of happy, successful owners, the more we'll cede control of our profession to non-veterinarians. This, to my way of thinking, is not a good thing.

Let there be no confusion: I consider this seemingly inexorable changing of the guard a deplorable state of affairs. As our places of work become increasingly overtaken by non-veterinary stakeholders, our voices are being muted, our values are being disregarded, and our incomes are being capped—often at levels that are too low to sustain a bright future in veterinary medicine for any of us, much less the young and the debt-saddled.

How I see it

I'm no conspiracy theorist, just a practical, economic-minded veterinarian whose front row seat over the past 25 years offers this panoramic view: A lot of nonveterinarian investors gleefully gaining control of the profession with their institutional money, schmoozing their way in by feeding us tales of generationally fueled financial lethargy and willfully mischaracterizing our "disinterest" in practice ownership as "dedication" to clinical veterinary medicine, instead.