Why the abrupt closure of a Bay Area vet clinic was seen as ‘slap-in-the-face treatment’ for staff and pet owners – San Francisco Chronicle

Bonnie Candell holds her senior dog Beastie, 12, outside her Oakland home. She is among hundreds of pet owners left in limbo to find pet care after an abrupt closure at Montclair Veterinary Hospital.
Bonnie Candell has to spoon-feed Beastie, her 12-year-old Chihuahua-terrier mix, because he has a dental infection and broken tooth. Late last week, she finally got results of an echocardiogram giving her dog clearance to get dental surgery with her vet, Montclair Veterinary Hospital in Oakland.
She was shocked to learn on Friday evening that the vet practice had shut down abruptly with no advance notice to its hundreds of clients or its 19-person staff.
“It will be a week before I can see another vet and get a refill for his antibiotics,” Candell said. “All that infection might come flooding back, and he could be in more pain and stop eating.”
Scores of other Montclair patients expressed similar concerns in interviews with The Chronicle and posts on social media, with emotions ranging from disbelief to anger as they scrambled to find care for their pets.
Bonnie Candell walks with her senior dog outside her Oakland home. She is among hundreds of pet owners left in limbo to find pet care after an abrupt closure at Montclair Veterinary Hospital.
“This decision was not made lightly or without consideration for our pet parent community,” said an email most Montclair clients received Friday evening, which said that the hospital was closing immediately.
Although the email was signed by “The Team at Montclair Veterinary Hospital,” staffers said they had no idea this was coming.
“We were all completely blindsided and flabbergasted,” said Dr. Rachel Moulton, Montclair’s medical director. “I’m devastated for my clients. So many lives got upended by this: the staff, the clients, the animals.”
Montclair was closed by its owner, Thrive Pet Healthcare, a Texas company with about 340 vet practices nationwide that bought the Oakland clinic four years ago.
“Continuing to operate the practice was no longer sustainable,” it said in a statement, adding that Montclair had experienced staff shortages like the rest of the industry.
Most vets used to be locally owned, but corporate consolidation has ramped up to the point where between 25% and 30% of U.S. veterinary clinics are owned by big companies, said Karen Felsted, a veterinarian and CPA whose Texas company PantheraT consults for vet practices.
Vet visits and pet ownership both increased during the pandemic, making vet practices even more attractive for corporate acquisitions. Pet owners spent a record $123.6 billion last year with vet care and medical products accounting for $34.3 billion of that, according to the American Pet Product Association.
Industry experts said it’s an open secret that Thrive hopes to go public in the near future, so it may be jettisoning properties that don’t perform to Wall Street standards.
Formerly called Pathway Vet Alliance and owned by Morgan Stanley, Thrive was purchased in March 2020 by San Francisco private-equity firm TSG Consumer Partners for a price estimated at $2 billion by the Wall Street Journal.
TSG declined to comment on the Montclair closure.
Thrive used to operate almost 100 vet clinics inside Petco stores, but last month the two companies parted ways with Petco buying out Thrive’s stake in their joint venture. Thrive said that “had nothing to do” with closing Montclair.
Gabriella Rivas, a vet tech at Montclair, said that Thrive told the staff on Thursday to cancel all Friday afternoon appointments in anticipation of a meeting. At the noon meeting, as the Montclair staff started to eat lunch, a Thrive vice president announced that the practice wasn’t making enough money; it was being closed immediately and they all were laid off.
“We were all in shock,” Rivas said. “I started crying. I saw my co-workers struggle with the news. They pulled us one by one into exam rooms to give us our severance packet.”
Rivas said Thrive is paying her through the end of May.
Moulton, the medical director, said Thrive told her about the closure five minutes before the noon meeting. She had never heard that Thrive had any issues with Montclair’s financial performance.
In fact, Thrive was about to remodel the practice’s building, she said. “We were really excited to renovate to make it flow more easily and make it more cat-friendly,” she said.
Bonnie Candell spends around $300 for medications for her dogs.
No California law bars vet clinics from abrupt closures. However they are required to maintain pets’ medical records for three years, and provide them within five days upon request, said the California Veterinary Medical Board.
“Montclair Veterinary Clinic’s website is currently displaying a pop-up that references the closure, recommends another facility, and provides an email address to request records,” it said in an email.
That’s cold comfort to pet owners.
“There had to have been other ways they could have handled it,” said Katherine Kott of Oakland. Her Brittany spaniel, Gabby, had growths on her gums removed last week; the biopsy results were due on Monday. She doesn’t know how she’ll obtain the results.
Felsted, the vet and CPA consultant, said it’s not unusual for a corporate group to shut down a vet clinic. Independent practices close as well, but usually when the vet reaches retirement age, she said.
“Many corporate groups at one time or another made a buying mistake; they bought a practice they thought would do great, then, for whatever reasons, it didn’t,” Felsted said. “They look at their portfolios to weed out locations that don’t work as well. It’s a typical business decision.”
But for pet owners, the shutdown felt like a “slap-in-the-face treatment of clients and staff,” as Candida Pugh of Oakland put it. Her German shepherd, Vela, age 12, has arthritis and a skin infection that hasn’t responded to medication. Now she has to seek a new vet “and they’ll have to start over from ground zero,” Pugh said.
Lydia Tonozzi said her dog Rocky, a 7-year-old mutt, has been extremely sick and losing weight. He was supposed to see a vet at Montclair early this week; she found out on Saturday afternoon that the clinic had closed.
“I’m really worried about what will happen while I try to find a new vet,” she said.
Carolyn Said is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @csaid
Carolyn Said, an enterprise reporter for The San Francisco Chronicle, covers transformation: how society, business, culture, education and other institutions are changing. Her stories shed light on the human impact of sweeping trends. As a reporter at The Chronicle since 1997, she has also covered the on-demand industry, the foreclosure crisis, the dot-com rise and fall, the California energy crisis and the fallout from economic downturns.

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