Let’s Get The Cat Out of the Bag

If Animal Rescues Are a Financial Vertebra of Veterinary Care, What Public Systems Are They Holding Up?

For many people, veterinary care is understood through a fairly simple lens. Veterinary clinics are places of care, and when they work with animal rescue groups, that work is often seen as an extension of their generosity. Clinics may offer discounts, accommodate urgent cases, or help when options are limited. Animals benefit, and goodwill follows.

That story is not false. 

But it is incomplete.

In many regions, these organizations, including animal shelters and foster-based groups, are not just recipients of discounted care. They are also steady, predictable clients. They fundraise specifically to pay for veterinary services, bring animals in organized groups, and reduce much of the administrative work that comes with individual appointments and billing. Over time, their cumulative spending can represent a meaningful and reliable portion of a clinic’s operational budget.

From the outside, these relationships are usually described as charity flowing in one direction. From inside the veterinary care system, they often function as something more reciprocal.

There is also a longer-term gain that is rarely acknowledged. Animals first seen at veterinary clinics through non-profit animal organizations often return with their families to the same clinic for years after adoption. Over time, these organizations function as a quiet but significant source of new, long-term clients for clinics, without that role ever being named or measured.

None of this makes discounted care inappropriate. It does, however, mean the relationship between veterinary clinics and non-profit animal organizations is more economically intertwined than the public framing suggests. That matters because the picture that reaches policymakers is incomplete.

That incomplete picture captures some generosity, but it does not capture value. It does not account for the contribution non-profit animal organizations make to the veterinary care system and its surrounding economy, often supported by volunteer labour and philanthropy from multiple sources. It also does not account for the contribution veterinary clinics make beyond what is paid for at market rates.

When value is not measured or acknowledged, it is not protected. Changes in volunteer availability, donor behaviour, or clinic capacity can destabilize both the veterinary care system and the non-profit animal welfare space as they currently operate, often without warning, because those contributions were never formally recognized in the first place.

At present, significant charitable and volunteer resources flow through non-profit animal organizations into the veterinary care system. If those resources are essential to maintaining access, their fragility matters. If they are not essential to private clinic viability, that raises a different question: whether some portion of those same dollars could instead be directed toward building and sustaining a non-profit veterinary sector designed explicitly to serve public health and safety goals in chronically underserved communities.

In either case, the absence of measurement leaves policymakers blind to both the scale of what is already being contributed by veterinary clinics and non-profit animal organizations and the options available for strengthening animal-related public health and safety systems. What currently functions as a financial backbone through informal arrangements could, with intent and public support, become part of a more stable and accountable veterinary care infrastructure for those who cannot afford to pay for profits.

This value does not appear in public cost-benefit analyses. It is not captured in health data, municipal reporting, or funding models. As a result, governments consistently underestimate both how much work is already being done and how fragile the current arrangement is, precisely because it relies on unpaid labour, private philanthropy, and professional accommodation.

This pattern is not unique to veterinary care. Animal-related injuries are often under-reported. The mental health impacts of under-managed animal populations rarely appear in health data. Calls and complaints to authorities go untracked, redirected, or unanswered, while community organizations continue to respond without mandate or public funding.

When contributions and impacts remain invisible, the status quo is easy to maintain. Volunteerism, donations, and discounts continue to stand in for public responsibility, not because the veterinary care system works well, but because its true costs never fully surface.

When non-profit veterinary clinics, fixed or mobile, are introduced, they are sometimes described as competing with private practices, even when they are explicitly designed to serve people and communities that private clinics were never set up to reach.

No one assumes a food bank is trying to put a grocery store out of business. Food banks exist because food access is treated, at least in part, as a public concern. Grocery stores are not expected to carry that responsibility alone through quiet discounts or informal accommodation.

In animal health, the absence of public systems has produced a very different expectation.

The arrangements that allow non-profit animal organizations and clinics to stabilize care depend on density. They work where there are enough donors, enough animals moving through organizational pipelines, and enough clinics nearby to absorb volume. They break down in rural, remote, and Indigenous communities, where those conditions do not exist.

In those settings, there may be no organization able to fundraise at scale, no steady flow of cases that makes planning easier, and no surplus capacity in clinics to absorb extra pressure. What remains is unmet animal health need and preventable risk to people and communities.

This is where the limits of the current approach become visible. Non-profit animal organizations are often financially fragile. Clinics are businesses with staff, debt, and overhead. Expecting either to function as a permanent substitute for public systems places strain on both, even when everyone involved is acting in good faith.

This is not an argument against collaboration between clinics and non-profit animal organizations. These relationships have enabled enormous amounts of care to happen in the absence of public infrastructure. The issue is that they have become structural. They are carrying responsibilities that were never formally assigned, planned for, or funded.

When essential services depend on informal arrangements, power imbalances are hard to avoid. Organizations can feel tied to particular clinics. Clinics are asked to absorb pressures that look increasingly like public health and safety work. And governments remain largely absent from a space that clearly affects community wellbeing.

Building a non-profit veterinary sector is one way to change that dynamic. A non-profit model does not mean a volunteer-dependent model. Veterinarians, technicians, and support staff can and should be fully paid for their work. Lower costs come from the absence of profit extraction, not from unpaid labour. Volunteers, where they exist, can augment services, but they should not be the foundation the system depends on.

Non-profit veterinary care does not replace private practice. It complements it. Just as food banks are not meant to replace grocery stores, non-profit veterinary services exist to address gaps in access, not to redefine the role of clinics.

Being honest about the economic reality of these relationships does not diminish generosity. It makes visible the informal scaffolding currently holding the system together. Naming that reality is what makes it possible to design something more stable in its place.

This isn’t a critique of veterinary practice. It’s about building systems that better support it.