Pets or Livestock: The Vet No Longer Decides the Purchase
Editor’s Note: This English version preserves the author’s original argument and writing style for publication on The Veterinary News & Views. The article is highly relevant for Pakistan’s veterinary, pet care, dairy, poultry, livestock and animal health business sectors because it explains how product-purchase decisions are no longer shaped by the veterinarian alone.
Suggested publication line: Republished with credit to Dr. Bernardo Otero and NEXUS ANIMAL HEALTH. Please add “Published with permission of the author” after confirmation.
Highlighted Key Sentences for Readers
[The Customer Already Decided Before Walking Into the Clinic.] [The veterinarian still matters. What’s gone is the idea that the vet decides — alone, or first.] [The vet no longer initiates the recommendation: they validate it, correct it… or compete against it.] [Either way, the lone veterinarian writing the script from the clinic is now the exception, not the rule.] [Stop asking “how do I get the vet to recommend me?”]Original Article
Pets or Livestock: The Vet No Longer Decides the Purchase
Global strategist in ANIMAL HEALTH. I help ANIMAL HEALTH companies grow in LATIN AMERICA | CEO and Founder of NEXUS ANIMAL HEALTH | 30 years of experience and US$13.6 million business expansion, sales, and regulations.
June 6, 2026
The Customer Already Decided Before Walking Into the Clinic
For 40 years, our entire industry has run on one belief: the veterinarian decides what gets bought.
The rep details the professional. The professional prescribes. The buyer obeys. Every dollar of our commercial budget — field forces, congresses, samples, channel discounts — points at that one person.
That belief is now wrong. And it’s wrong on both sides of the business.
The pet owner walks in already decided — convinced by a reel, a review, a breeders’ group, an AI chat at midnight. The livestock buyer was never really persuaded by the field vet either; that call now sits with integrators, nutritionists and procurement committees.
The veterinarian still matters. What’s gone is the idea that the vet decides — alone, or first.
So here’s the question worth bringing to your next commercial meeting: if the decision is no longer made in the clinic, why is almost all of our money still aimed there?
The decision to buy a pet product is barely made in the veterinary clinic anymore.
It’s made in a reel. In a breeders’ WhatsApp group.
In a marketplace review.
And increasingly, in a conversation with an AI at 11 p.m.
The animal health industry keeps investing as if none of that existed.
For 40 years, our entire commercial model rested on a single premise: the veterinarian is the gateway to the recommendation. The rep details the professional, the professional prescribes, the owner obeys.
We built everything on that premise: field forces, congresses, samples, professional-channel discounts, technical materials. All of it aimed at one person: the prescriber.
I call this the myth of the sole prescriber.
And it is breaking right in front of us — on both sides of the industry.
Companion animals: the recommendation fragments outward
Today the pet owner walks into the clinic with the decision already made. Informed — or misinformed — by an influencer, by reviews, by a breed forum, by a chatbot. The vet no longer initiates the recommendation: they validate it, correct it… or compete against it.
Make no mistake: this does not mean the veterinarian stopped mattering. The vet is still the highest technical authority there is.
What changed is that the vet stopped being the first voice — and often is no longer even the only one.
“But surely large animals are different.” Yes — and that makes it worse
This is where most executives push back: “In livestock the vet still decides.”
Not really. In large animals the prescriber didn’t disappear — it moved. And it didn’t fragment outward toward the owner; it consolidated upward, toward institutions that the individual field vet doesn’t control.
In poultry, the “prescriber” was never really the field veterinarian.
It’s the integrator’s technical department. One protocol, decided centrally, cascades to thousands of contract producers. You don’t win that with a charismatic rep and an elegant detail — you win it with trials, cost per kilo, supply reliability and a seat at the integrator’s technical committee.
In dairy and beef, the consulting vet still carries real weight — but rarely decides alone. The nutritionist co-owns the protocol. The farm’s financial or procurement manager weighs cost per head and credit terms. In professionalized operations — mega-dairies, feedlots, planting pools — buying animal health inputs looks like buying any other industrial input: committees, tenders, KPIs.
And for the smaller producer, the rep at the local agropecuaria still shapes the choice as much as any veterinarian does.
Layer on top antimicrobial-use regulation, residue limits and traceability. Protocols are being standardized, documented and audited — which by design strips discretion away from the individual prescriber and hands it to a system.
Two opposite mechanisms, one conclusion
So large animals don’t disprove the myth. They prove it from the other side.
In companion animals, the recommendation fragments outward — toward the owner, the influencer, the screen.
In livestock, it consolidates upward — toward integrators, corporate technical departments, nutritionists and professionalized buyers.
Either way, the lone veterinarian writing the script from the clinic is now the exception, not the rule.
The uncomfortable budget question
And yet, in both segments, we still pour the overwhelming majority of the commercial budget into one-to-one detailing of the individual professional — and treat everyone else who actually shapes the decision as someone else’s problem: the retailer’s, the e-commerce platform’s, the integrator’s procurement team’s, “marketing’s.”
Meanwhile, the brands gaining ground are the ones showing up where the decision is genuinely formed — in front of the pet owner, and inside the integrator’s and the nutritionist’s decision room — and turning the veterinarian into an ally, not a tollgate.
The shift in question
Stop asking “how do I get the vet to recommend me?”
Start asking:
“In my segment, who actually forms the decision today — and do I show up in those rooms, bringing the veterinarian with me instead of depending on the vet alone?”
Whoever keeps answering only the old question will have an impeccable sales force aimed at a door that fewer and fewer decisions walk through.
I want real debate, not applause. And I especially want to hear from my fellow veterinarians — in both small and large animal:
Am I overstating this? Or are we still defending a model of influence that the market — owners on one side, integrators and corporate buyers on the other — already left behind, and no one wants to be the first to say it out loud?
I’ll read you in the comments…👇
BERNARDO OTERO Animal Health business leadership in LATAM
Founder & CEO, NEXUS ANIMAL HEALTH