Who Do You Trust? Your Vet Or Your Feed?
What you'll find in this article:
- Why pet owners are quietly losing faith in vets — and why that distrust hasn’t come from nowhere
- How the misinformation trap opens, and the real consequences for animals when it does
- The unexpected thing that could fix both problems — and why it's simpler than the experts make it sound
It's late. Evening has slipped away into the night and you're sitting on the sofa, phone glow lighting up your face as you scroll and read and watch and listen — each video connecting to the next. Tonight’s rabbit hole isn't about the latest makeup trend or a drag race between supercars, it’s about your poorly dog and you're desperately trying to find an answer, a reason, something that will make him better.
But how did we get to this place — where TikTok feels more trustworthy than a qualified vet?
The answer, it turns out, isn't really about social media at all. It's about what happens when trust breaks down, and who fills the vacuum when it does.
The drift is real — and it's accelerating
As someone who has spent fifteen years in the pet industry, I'll admit I was surprised by what the numbers actually show. I'm a fairly traditional believer that professionals — doctors for humans, vets for pets — remain the most credible and knowledgeable people to turn to when something is wrong. The data still broadly agrees with me but the direction of travel is uncomfortable reading.
In 2022, 64% of UK pet owners named their vet as their primary source of advice. By 2024, according to the RSPCA's Animal Kindness Index, that figure had dropped to 57%. Three percentage points a year might sound modest. Sustained over several years, it's a structural shift in behaviour. At the same time, the proportion of owners turning to social media for pet health information rose from 10% to 13% in a single year — and among 18 to 34 year olds, social media already rivals the vet as the first port of call.
These aren't people abandoning their pets, they are people who love their animals deeply and are trying to do the right thing. Many aren't actually replacing their vet — they're using social media to seek a second opinion after a consultation, to validate or interrogate what they've been told. This detail matters because it tells us this isn't about irresponsibility, it's about eroded confidence.
The trust was broken before anyone opened TikTok
An endless feed of pet-focused accounts, many offering genuinely amusing and lovable, genuinely informative content, draws millions of views every day. But the same algorithms that serve you a golden retriever learning to skateboard will also serve you something more dangerous — because algorithms reward fear and outrage, and bad information travels faster than good. Anyone can claim expertise online where follower counts have replaced qualifications as the currency of credibility.
But blaming social media misses the deeper question: why were so many owners already primed to distrust the profession before they ever picked up their phones?
A Competition and Markets Authority investigation into UK veterinary practices — the most extensive review of the sector in a generation — gives an illuminating answer. Launched in September 2023, it attracted 56,000 responses during its course: 45,000 from the general public, 11,000 from within the profession itself. That level of engagement is almost without precedent for a market investigation. The final report, published on 24 March 2026, confirmed what many owners had long suspected.
Almost 60% of UK veterinary practices are now owned by just six large corporate groups — often operating under their original local names, so owners have no idea the practice has changed hands. Average veterinary prices have risen by more than 60% since 2016. Four of the six large groups were found to be generating profits that materially exceeded the cost of capital. And satisfaction scores at corporate-owned practices were significantly lower than at independent ones — lowest of all among owners who didn't even realise their practice had been acquired.
The CMA's own language was telling. Among its stated aims was protecting "clinical judgement from undue commercial pressure." When a regulator has to write that into a binding report, it is formally acknowledging that commercial interests have been shaping what happens in the consulting room. Is it really surprising that owners, picking up on that atmosphere even without knowing the specifics, started looking elsewhere for advice they could trust?
One important distinction is worth making — though it's one most owners never get the chance to make. The anger that has built up around pricing and commercial pressure is largely aimed at the wrong target. Pet owners don't sit across the table from a corporate investment group, they sit across the table from their vet. So it is the vet who absorbs the distrust, the suspicion, the sideways glance when a treatment is recommended — even when that vet is themselves caught between genuine clinical judgement and the commercial pressures their employer applies. The individual vet, in many cases, is a casualty of the same system as their client. The difference is that the owner doesn't see that — and the corporate structure is largely invisible to them by design.
Where eroded trust leads
This is where the stakes become serious.
Vaccine hesitancy among pet owners is rising on both sides of the Atlantic. Research has found that over half of US dog owners now express some level of uncertainty about pet vaccines — with significant numbers believing them to be unsafe, ineffective, or unnecessary. UK figures are tracking in the same direction. The driving narratives are consistent: that vaccines cause autoimmune disease, compromising immunity for life, and are pushed by vets primarily for profit. None of this is supported by evidence. All of it circulates freely online, amplified by the same algorithms that brought the owner to the platform in the first place.
Actual numbers of vaccine take up and owners vaccine hesitancy are probably skewed slightly because reputable kennels require animals to have up to date vaccination records, The gap between belief and action is foggy.
The consequences are tangible. Vets are reporting cases of parvovirus and leptospirosis — diseases that vaccination had effectively eliminated from most practices — appearing again in unvaccinated animals. These are preventable deaths.
Part of what makes the misinformation trap so difficult to escape is that it's self-reinforcing. The more a worried owner engages with content questioning veterinary advice, the more the algorithm serves them. A community of like-minded, fearful, well-meaning people forms around them. The echo chamber closes.
Facts alone won't fix this — but something else might
The veterinary profession's instinct has been to fight back with science — point-by-point rebuttals, evidence-based content, expert explainers. The message is absolutely necessary but it is not sufficient in its delivery.
An owner who already distrusts the system doesn't respond well to being corrected from above, the medium and the manner matter as much as the message. The vets who are actually cutting through online are doing something different. They're sitting on the floor with their own animals, speaking plainly, acknowledging that the profession has a trust problem it needs to own and admitting uncertainty where it honestly exists — and then giving the science. That's not spin, it’s genuine communication and audiences can feel the difference.
Pet influencers have an equally important role to play — arguably a greater one, because their audiences already trust them and don't arrive with their guard up. An influencer with four hundred thousand followers who genuinely cares about animal welfare is uniquely positioned to reach the people a vet's account never could. That carries a responsibility where the same social media ecosystem that spreads misinformation is the only realistic arena in which to counter it. You can't fight TikTok by writing a white paper.
The most powerful shift wouldn't come from vets and influencers simply doing more of what they already do, but better. It would come from them doing it together. An honest, public conversation between a vet and a well-followed pet creator — one where they genuinely disagree on some things, find common ground on others, and treat their audience as capable of handling both — would do more to rebuild trust than a hundred individual posts. Not a debate, not a takedown, but a conversation. The difference matters.
The same antidote
Here's what connects all of this: the corporate trust crisis and the misinformation crisis share a single root cause, opacity and disconnection. The feeling of being managed rather than respected.
And they share a single antidote.
The CMA reforms now legally require practices to publish price lists, disclose ownership, provide written estimates, and cap prescription fees — all before the end of 2026. What that legislation is actually describing, stripped of the regulatory language, is transparency. Treating people as adults, showing your working.
The vets and influencers who can win trust online are doing exactly the same thing in a different arena. No hidden agenda, no product quietly being sold alongside the fear, no condescension dressed up as concern. Just honesty, in public, with the animal's welfare genuinely at the centre.
And this doesn’t have to be a battle at all. It can be a collaborative journey but it does require trust and respect between the different messengers who really care about animal wellbeing.
The owner scrolling at midnight doesn't need to be lectured. They need to be met where they are, by someone they can believe.
That has always been true. It just matters more now than it ever has.