Pet Owners Are Skipping Wellness Visits. They Are Still Paying for Complex Surgery. Here Is What That Tells Us.
The split between routine care and emergency care spending is the most important trend in veterinary economics right now, and it has direct implications for how practices think about their patient base.
Matthew Joseph, a 41-year-old New Yorker, spent money on lifesaving spleen surgery for Frankie, his 14-year-old dog. “The amount that we spend on Frankie, you could probably buy a Hyundai, or finance one at least,” he told Bloomberg. He did it anyway.
That is not an unusual story anymore. It is, in fact, the story of where veterinary economics is right now — and understanding it clearly matters more for practices than any single data point about visit volume or price inflation.
The split that defines the current market
Vet visits declined 3 percent in the fourth quarter of last year, marking the 16th consecutive quarter of declines, according to Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Ann-Hunter van Kirk. Last month, visits fell 1.7 percent year-over-year, per Vetsource data. Pet services inflation, including veterinary care, ran at 5.1 percent in February compared to a 2.4 percent overall CPI increase, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Those numbers, taken together, paint one picture. But the picture is incomplete without the other half.
Emergency hospital visits are holding. Higher-value diagnostics are holding. Major surgical interventions — the $11,000 splenectomies, the orthopedic repairs, the oncology workups — are holding. The Zoetis CFO said at the Leerink Global Healthcare Conference in March that owners are still spending specifically on higher-cost visits. IDEXX, Zoetis, and Elanco continue to report earnings growth even as foot traffic trends lower. Van Kirk noted only low correlation between visit volume declines and the financial performance of veterinary pharmaceutical companies — because the high-value end of the care continuum is still moving.
What is falling is the discretionary end. Wellness visits. Preventive care. The annual exam where nothing is wrong and the client pays $200 for reassurance and vaccines. That is the visit owners are spacing out or skipping. The $11,000 surgery? That still happens.
The psychology driving the behavior
Harold Herzog, professor emeritus at Western Carolina University and a researcher in the psychology of human-animal interactions, described to Bloomberg the trajectory of the pet-owner relationship over the past two decades: pets have moved “from the yard to the kitchen into the bedroom,” and as that proximity has deepened, so has the willingness to spend when something is seriously wrong.
The behavioral pattern is internally consistent for the owners living it. Andi Lichtenfeld, a 37-year-old dog owner who does not have pet insurance, told Bloomberg she takes her dogs to the vet for emergencies or when they do not seem like themselves — and for vaccines, she goes to Petco. “This is similar to how she treats herself,” the story noted; when she’s sick, she goes to the doctor.
That is not irrationality. That is a rational response to financial pressure applied to a system where preventive care feels optional and emergency care does not. The problem is that from a clinical standpoint, the preventive visits are the ones that catch the things early — the early-stage chronic kidney disease, the developing cardiac murmur, the abdominal mass that costs $11,000 to address surgically but might have been managed differently with earlier detection.
Ingrid Tague, a professor at the University of Denver who studies the history of human-pet relationships, made the observation that as more people delay or forgo having children, pets increasingly fill that emotional role — and the spending patterns follow. “The more we treat them as people, the more we get caught up in that same kind of consumerist cycle that we have for ourselves.”
What this means for practices
The data creates a clear strategic picture for veterinary practices, and it is more nuanced than “visits are down, this is bad.”
The practices most exposed to the current environment are those heavily dependent on high-volume routine wellness visits with thin margins per appointment. The visits being deferred first are exactly those. The practices better positioned are those generating revenue from diagnostics, specialty referrals, emergency and critical care, dentistry, and higher-acuity medicine — because that end of the spectrum is where owner willingness to pay remains strong.
The harder clinical argument — and the one worth making directly to clients — is that the $11,000 surgery is often the downstream consequence of skipping the $200 annual exam. The spleen mass that ruptures was, at some point, a spleen mass that could have been found. The diabetic crisis that brings a cat to the emergency clinic at 2am was, at some point, a weight change and increased thirst that an annual wellness visit might have caught. Framing preventive care not as a routine expense but as the thing that makes the catastrophic expense less likely is not a marketing argument — it is the clinical truth, and it is worth saying clearly and often.
Van Kirk’s long-term thesis on the sector is worth noting: IDEXX’s long-term growth should be fueled by heightened spending by younger consumers and increased pet life expectancy that requires more expensive care. Longer-lived pets with more managed chronic conditions are more diagnostically intensive, not less. The pet that used to be euthanized at 12 with untreated disease is now the pet that is managed with pharmaceuticals, monitoring, and specialist referrals through 15 or 16. That is good medicine and good economics for the practices equipped to deliver it.
The current period of routine visit pressure is real. It is also probably not the long-term trajectory.
BLS CPI data referenced is from the February 2026 release. Vet visit data is per Vetsource and Bloomberg Intelligence. Quotes from Matthew Joseph, Andi Lichtenfeld, Harold Herzog, Ingrid Tague, Ann-Hunter van Kirk, Wetteny Joseph, and Keith Devas are sourced from Bloomberg reporting by Emily Forgash and Rachel Phua, published March 23, 2026.
