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Hello 👋
Welcome back to another edition of Weekend Rounds!
September is on its way out, the first frost warnings are creeping into the forecast across North America, and somewhere a clinic is debating whether the Halloween costume contest counts as team building (it does, but only if pets get to dress up too).
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Here’s what we’ve got for you today:
🇬🇧 The UK caps vet prescription fees
📈 Practice owners are still happy
🔄 Rounds Roundup
👍 One Good Thing
🇬🇧 The UK caps vet prescription fees
The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has made its veterinary remedies legally binding, wrapping up an investigation that found vet prices had been climbing at nearly twice the rate of inflation. We covered this story when the investigation launched in 2023 and again in 2025 when the plan was put forward.
Practices have up to 12 months to comply, with timelines depending on the rule and the size of the group. The headline change is a £21 cap on written prescription fees. But that’s not all. UK Vets must also:
tell clients when a medication is available more cheaply online
publish a comprehensive price list covering consultations, common procedures and cremation
provide a written estimate for any non-emergency treatment expected to cost £500 or more
declare whether they're independent or part of a group.
All that information will flow through the RCVS "Find a Vet" service to third-party comparison sites, so pet owners can make more informed choices. But there’s a hidden irony in this all: the investigation was initially prompted in part by consolidation (six firms own more than two thirds of UK practices). However it’s independents that could end up being squeezing the hardest since the big chains are better suited to absorb the compliance work and the lost pharmacy revenue.
Why it matters: For most of our North American readers, this is just a story to watch as there is no comparable intervention on the table here. But the underlying pressures are familiar: rising fees, frustrated clients, online pharmacies and a steadily consolidating ownership landscape. Regulators tend to borrow from each other, and the UK has now written a very detailed template. Price transparency is coming one way or another, whether through regulation or client expectation.
📈 Practice owners are still happy
AVMA's Chart of the Month for September draws on its annual Census of Veterinarians and lands on a tidy finding: more than three in four practice owners said they were satisfied or very satisfied with their job, their compensation and their lifestyle in 2025. More telling than the number is its consistency. Owner satisfaction held fairly steady across the five-year window, including 2021 and 2022, when practices were still absorbing the aftershocks of the pandemic.
AVMA credits the usual suspects: autonomy over culture and direction, the chance to line up daily work with long-term goals, and equity that builds quietly in the background.
But as always, data sets can be skewed so it’s worth noting that this is a snapshot of people who are still owners. Anyone who found ownership miserable has likely sold, closed, or gone back to work at a different practice, and they don't show up in the owner column. Survivorship bias doesn't erase the finding, but it does flatter it. Second, the post doesn't show how owners compare with associates on the same measures, which is the comparison we’d truly like to see.
🔄 Rounds Roundup
Here are some of the other stories that caught our eye and we're following this week from around the veterinary world and animal kingdom:
Experimental drug slows bone cancer cell growth in dog and human lab tests. Ohio State tested Telomir-Zn on canine and human osteosarcoma cell lines. Promising, but it's in vitro data from a company announcement and hasn't been peer reviewed.
Robotic surgery finds a veterinary niche as only three veterinary hospitals worldwide have a surgical robot, and Colorado State is set to join them with a secondhand da Vinci retired from human medicine
First known cases of feline Marfan syndrome discovered in cat siblings (Cornell): Gary and Shaggy, two long-limbed brothers, carry two altered copies of FBN1, and a variant that only partially disrupts the gene may explain how they made it to adulthood.
IDEXX acquires CoVet. The AI scribe joins IDEXX's software ecosystem but will keep supporting other practice management systems. Terms weren't disclosed. The ecosystem arms race rolls on.
Relief veterinarians face unique challenges that raise the risk of burnout. Burnout is up, but so is professional fulfillment, and the piece ends with a practical checklist for clinics that want their relief vets to come back. Content note: burnout and mental health.
Researchers just discovered the first new cat species in more than a century. The tilcayo, (Leopardus tilcayo) weighs three to four pounds and lives in Bolivia's cloud forests. The first known specimen spent a year being fed noodles, rice and eggs by a man who thought it was a house cat.
👍 One Good Thing
At the prolific rate Anish Moonka posts, we can't guarantee he's a real person and not a bot. Either way, we discovered his Twitter X account this week, and it’s worth a follow. Moonka digs up older research, mostly from the National Library of Medicine, and posts a quick synopsis with a link to the study. It's a steady dose of interesting stuff in a feed otherwise dominated by people typing awful things at each other.
On Friday the theme was the power of green spaces, with posts on studies linking greener surroundings to better working memory, lower odds of dying and improved immunity.
Earlier this month he turned to pets, which is why it caught our eye. Here are a few highlights, and the original papers he cited:
Dogs and people who live alone. A 2017 Swedish study of 3.4 million adults found that among people living alone, dog owners had a 36% lower risk of dying from cardiovascular disease and a 33% lower risk of dying from any cause. The benefit applied to single-person households generally, not just men. (Tweet | Study)
As we know better than most casual X users, these are associations, not proof that a cat will fix your cholesterol. But the next time a client asks whether getting a dog is a good idea, you have some light reading to send them.
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