Most practices sit on client data they never open. Here's the revenue left behind.6.6 million horses, 2 million households, and the R&D math that never closed, until nowClinic prescription revenue fell 6.1 points in one year. Here's the category math that matters.Your client's phone says the dog is declining. Your exam says he's fine. Which one do you chart?62% of cats enter homes informally, and CATalyst Council just built the funnel to fix itThe K9 handler training program that turns ER downtime into a referral engineHill's just made the CKD diet compliance problem optionalThe Vegas CE monopoly everyone accepted until Viticus Group just split itMost practices sit on client data they never open. Here's the revenue left behind.6.6 million horses, 2 million households, and the R&D math that never closed, until nowClinic prescription revenue fell 6.1 points in one year. Here's the category math that matters.Your client's phone says the dog is declining. Your exam says he's fine. Which one do you chart?62% of cats enter homes informally, and CATalyst Council just built the funnel to fix itThe K9 handler training program that turns ER downtime into a referral engineHill's just made the CKD diet compliance problem optionalThe Vegas CE monopoly everyone accepted until Viticus Group just split it
The WireBy The VeterinaryPracticeNow Desk3 min readSeptember 4, 2026
6.6 million horses, 2 million households, and the R&D math that never closed, until now
BI's GB approval and a peer-reviewed regenerative trial, in a category the industry has treated as economically unjustifiable.
6.6 million horses in the U.S. according to the American Horse Council's 2023 Economic Impact study, spread across 2 million households per the American Pet Products Association's 2025 survey. Boehringer Ingelheim just announced approval of a therapy for insulin dysregulation in horses and ponies in Great Britain. A few weeks earlier, a peer-reviewed controlled trial in equine regenerative medicine for an allogenic equine umbilical cord connective tissue matrix appeared in print.
The margin problem those numbers create
Equine has long struggled to find a business-unit home inside animal-health companies, too specialized for companion-animal divisions, too niche for livestock, too small to justify a dedicated team. From an R&D perspective, the relatively low number of horse-owning households and the lack of recent, reliable horse-population data make it extremely difficult to create financially justifiable market potential assumptions. The result: equine has been treated as the wild west, with little need for traditional FDA product approvals or sustained investment.
The American Horse Council's 2023 study segmented the 6.6 million horses into sectors, racing, recreation, competition, and the legitimizing of regenerative medicine (PRP) and pain-management modalities (laser, chiropractic, massage) for humans has started to shift the frame. While the equine market will always be dwarfed by cats, dogs, and livestock, we're reading recent product activity as a signal the floor on what counts as a viable equine product may have moved.
What the approvals actually mean
A GB approval for insulin dysregulation and a peer-reviewed regenerative-medicine trial both represent investment in controlled studies and regulatory work, costs the industry has historically been reluctant to carry for this segment. That's new. The misread: treating this as proof that equine is now a growth category for pharma. Our read: companies are running the unit economics on equine products and some are deciding the return justifies the regulatory path, and if that's true, the mixed-animal practices that still see horses can stop treating equine as a loss leader and start treating it as a service line that can carry margin.
What this means for the practice that still does equine
If you're a mixed-animal DVM and equine is currently the thing you do because your clients ask and you can't say no, recent product activity changes the calculation. Investment in new tools means higher-value case mix, which means equine time blocks start justifying themselves against small-animal appointment volume.
For the rural practice owner, equine capability has been a defensive asset: it keeps clients from driving 90 minutes to a specialist. If margin improves, it becomes an offensive growth lever. For the equine specialist, approved products mean better ability to compete with university hospitals on outcomes, not just on convenience or cost. The tools matter. If the tools improve, case complexity you can handle in private practice expands, and referral capture improves.
Whether additional approvals follow. The American Horse Council's segmentation work and the legitimizing of regenerative modalities in human medicine both create tailwinds, but tailwinds don't fund clinical trials. Someone has to decide the 6.6 million horses and 2 million households justify the cost. If they do, equine stops being the orphan category and starts being a margin opportunity for practices that can deliver it. If they don't, recent approvals were outliers, and the unit economics stay broken.
The number to watch: not total horse population, but the subset willing to pay for advanced therapeutics. That's the addressable market pharma actually underwrites, and no one has published it.
Get the next issue in your inbox. Free, weekly, no fluff.
