Today James Herriot’s surgery would be part of a mega chain – and run by a woman

For one thing, it shows us which creatures we spend our cash on: mainly on dogs and cats. Over the decades, vets have flooded into cities, where all the jobs are. In 2024, only 22% of vets were purely rural.

As for farm animals: “We are not willing to pay for better care of them at the level of the supermarket,” says Professor Jonathan Rushton, a specialist in the economics of animal health at the University of Liverpool. Meat prices have stayed low while farming has declined and consolidated to cut costs – costs that include vets’ bills. Farmers with giant dairy herds no longer call vets out at night at calving time. Instead they train up employees to handle all but the most difficult births. “I have been in meetings where it’s been said we only need about 130 vets for all the cows in the UK,” says Rushton.

But despite this shift, there are shortages – vets are ditching the countryside even faster than the countryside is ditching vets. Surveys of veterinary students find that most consider working in rural areas when they start but change their minds during training. Rural practice is no longer the attractively varied profession Alf Wight wrote about in his books (James Herriot was a pen name). Instead of visiting individual pigs with problems, country vets may find their time is mainly spent drawing up data-driven health plans for huge herds of animals. Country vets now specialise in cows or horses but not both.

Shortages are particularly acute in far-flung areas: last year Scotland’s Rural College, near Aberdeen, was granted the power to award veterinary degrees, partly to encourage young vets to set up practices in the north-east of Scotland.

Meanwhile, even as the treatment of farm animals is increasingly impersonal and efficient, pet care is becoming more personalised and costly. The gap between what is offered to humans and sick spaniels is closing. Chemotherapy, heart surgery, hip replacements, stem-cell therapy and genetic testing are all now available to pets, and there is a growing market in prosthetic limbs.

This partly reflects innovations catching up with human medicine. “There is usually a 10- to 20-year lag,” says Rob Williams, president of the British Veterinary Association, the professional body for vets. That is the case even if the original treatments or devices were tested on animals first. It also reveals a change in the national psyche. People see pets as one of the family; many will pay accordingly.

The economics of the profession are changing too, reflecting another shift. Herriot operated in an era when small practices were owned by independent vets, but the rules changed in 1999 to allow anyone to buy them up. Now about 60% of vets are owned by six large corporations – up from 10% in 2013. These are CVS Group, IVC, Medivet, Pets at Home, VetPartners and Linnaeus – which is now owned by Mars, the US chocolate company. That mirrors a wider story about parts of human healthcare that fall outside the NHS. Private equity is also “rolling up” individual dentists and opticians – as well as care homes and rehabilitation clinics.

Turning vets over to private companies has advantages, says Williams. “Vets are very clinically focused and don’t always make the best managers.” Treatments are standardised, and there is more support for employees, he says, such as increases in maternity leave. And vets in a larger business can call on a wider range of experts for advice.

But it comes with considerable downsides. Vets used to aspire to open their own business or become a partner – consider Heriot’s boss, Siegfried Farnon – but that option is fading. And there are more serious concerns. Last year, the Office for National Statistics found vet bills had risen by about 50% since 2015. Treating a cat’s cystitis, for example, now costs around £300; a bloated dog might set you back £480. An investigation by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) found vet practices were marking up medicines, sometimes to four times the purchase price. Owners were often unaware they could get their prescriptions for less elsewhere.

This year the BBC reported vets feeling pressured by “targets” to sell pet owners treatments they don’t need. Animal charities have warned that owners are giving up their pets rather than pay extortionate bills. Similarly, rising prices for human dental and eye patients are linked to corporate takeovers – leaving many without proper healthcare. Britain's socialised health system can mask a crisis at the margins.

The profession has changed in a third way. In 1960, fewer than 5% of vets were women. Now they make up 61%, according to the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons, which regulates the profession. And nearly 80% of new graduates are female. Girls outperform boys at secondary school, and vet colleges require high grades. Rising gender equality may have revealed a female preference for the caring professions, especially now that vets no longer need to demonstrate brute strength – women make up 60% of medical students, too – but it may also be that stagnating wages and lack of career progression put boys off.

These trends are unlikely to reverse as they reflect larger social shifts: work everywhere is concentrating in cities and becoming more female; healthcare is an ever more attractive investment – animals, like people, will always get ill, even in recessions. Animal farming will continue to dwindle, but there is a case for making the job much more bearable, especially in the countryside: more money might be a start. Avaricious companies must be better regulated.

Meanwhile, vets are surely overdue an updated literary take on their profession: it might involve Jane Herriot and a roster of sick chihuahuas.

Photograph by Mordolff/Getty Images