When vets kill pets, Arizona’s oversight system looks the other way, distraught owners say

Staci Foulks leads her dog, Greta, through an agility course. Photo courtesy Staci Foulks

Staci Foulks and her dog, Greta, were inseparable. 

“She was the kind of dog that would follow me into the bathroom. I couldn’t go to the bathroom alone, because Greta would be there staring at me,” she said. 

On her lunch breaks, Foulks would often come home to Greta and take the Swedish Vallhund out to the forest near her home in Flagstaff so the two could use up some of their pent up energy. 

“In a way, she kind of became my unofficial emotional support animal,” Foulks said. 

When Foulks was pregnant in 2020, Greta moved into the role of protector, laying her head on Foulks’ belly. When Greta started acting strange, wanting to go outside to the bathroom over and over and over, all day long, Foulks knew to take her to their family veterinarian.

That’s when things quickly started to go downhill. 

The vet wanted to get a urine sample, suspecting a urinary tract infection, and used an invasive procedure to do so. The vet stuck a needle through Greta’s abdomen in a procedure called cystocentesis to obtain the urine, something Foulks was unaware of.  

In records obtained by Foulks, vet technicians voiced concern over the procedure, but the vet went ahead with it anyway. Shortly after, Greta collapsed. Vet techs sprang into action and performed CPR on Greta as Foulks watched, but they were unable to revive her. 

An autopsy found a “large volume” of blood in Greta’s abdomen, a “large volume” of clotted blood behind the bladder and kidneys and a “laceration” that was consistent with complications from the cystocentesis. 

Foulks was devastated. Her companion for the past seven years was now gone, and she was there to witness it all. She didn’t know if she could trust a vet again.

And her faith in the system was shaken even more when the state board that oversees veterinarians, and is charged with holding them accountable when they make mistakes, concluded that the doctor who botched the cystocentesis and killed Greta didn’t do anything wrong.

Foulks’ case is not an isolated event. The Arizona Mirror has reviewed cases released by an advocacy group that is trying to bring more transparency to a process that is supposed to hold veterinarians accountable for bad actions, but that critics say is utterly failing to do so because it’s essentially a situation where the fox is guarding the henhouse. 

The Arizona State Veterinary Medical Examining Board, the state’s regulatory agency that oversees licensing and discipline for vets, routinely dismisses cases of abuse. 

The result is animal owners are left dismayed about what they see as a lack of accountability, something critics say is largely due to the fact that the board consists mostly of veterinarians, who are expected to be objective while reviewing complaints against colleagues. 

“It kinda felt like an old boys club, like they’re protecting their own,” Foulks said of her experience with the board. “It really left me confused, feeling gaslighted and even more anxious about the world in general. Can I ever trust a vet again?”

What is the veterinary board? 

Arizona has dozens of regulatory boards that oversee the issuing of licenses and other functions for a host of professions. To ensure there is a level of subject matter expertise on these boards, they are largely made up of people within those professions, whether that be veterinarians, architects, nurses or dentists. 

But licensing is only one duty of those boards: They are also responsible for investigating and resolving complaints made against the licensees. For example, if a dentist removes the wrong tooth and then refuses to remove the right one, the patient can file a complaint against that dentist. If the board determines the dentist violated professional rules or state laws, they could face sanctions, including having their license revoked. 

But the boards are far from perfect, and often take long periods of time to investigate complaints, according to audits of many of these boards by the Arizona Auditor General’s Office. 

The Arizona State Veterinary Medical Examining Board is no different. 

A review of the board conducted in 1997 found the board did not appropriately discipline veterinarians and that “as many as one out of every six complaints dismissed” by the board “should have resulted in some discipline.” State auditors haven’t looked at the board’s operations in the 27 years since.

That finding is one that some are saying is still an issue. 

Foulks appealed the board’s October 2022 dismissal of her complaint. When she finally got her opportunity to address the board about Greta’s death in April 2024, she was nervous, but prepared: An attorney herself, Foulks had done her research and even brought in an outside expert to provide testimony about her complaint. 

But things did not go the way she had planned. 

The board told her that they had no obligation to hear a second opinion after their investigation found no wrongdoing on the part of the vet who performed the cystocentesis that ultimately led to Greta’s death. 

Foulks even recalled that one of the board members rolled her eyes as she spoke. Neither the veterinarian or her attorney showed up. 

“I don’t think anytime in my life I’ve felt that angry and disappointed,” Foulks said. “They led me to believe they cared and that they’d listen…I have trouble not using expletives when explaining what happened.” 

‘It kept gnawing at me’

Foulks’ experience is not an isolated one. 

“It is like having the judiciary overseeing the judiciary,” Veronica Postel told the Mirror. 

Postel went to the board after an experience with a veterinarian that left her worried for the health and well-being of other pets. 

Postel’s cat, Jasmine, had spent a day vomiting and with diarrhea, so she took her to the nearest 24-hour emergency veterinarian because it was too late in the day for her normal veterinarian. 

The first thing they did was take her cat away from her and perform an exam out of her sight. When the veterinarian came back, she said that there was “some sort of string” attached to Jasmine’s tooth that was going down her throat, which Postel found odd. 

The veterinarian then began to say that it was creating a “sawing” motion in Jasmine’s throat and gut, explaining that they’d need to perform emergency surgery. Postel said she felt something was off, and when she asked if she could see the string and her cat, the vet left the room reluctantly. 

After bringing Jasmine back into the room, they both peered into her mouth to see no string. The vet, she said, quickly changed her tune, saying that it was instead an “intestinal blockage.” She even brought in an x-ray and started theorizing about where it could be. 

The cost of the surgery would be $3,000, and the veterinarian pressed Postel to authorize it, saying Jasmine could die that night if it wasn’t fixed. But Postel said things felt “off.” 

Then they took an even stranger turn. After Postel refused the surgery to fix the suspected intestinal blockage, the vet then suggested “exploratory surgery” to find the problem. Postel had enough. 

She insisted no surgery was needed and was forced to sign paperwork saying she was leaving against medical advice, leaving with a $500 bill and anti-nausea medicine. 

“To sum it up, it was an absolutely both horrific and surreal experience,” Postel said. “I’ve never been treated by a veterinarian like I was, and it was almost a Twilight Zone experience.” 

As Postel left, the vet said she’d have the radiologist look at the images to “make sure” they were making the right call. The next morning, she got a call confirming her suspicions: there was no blockage. 

“It kept gnawing at me,” Postel said. “If she is doing this to me, they are doing it to other people.”

She remembered feeling guilty that her decision to refuse surgery — even as the vet told her there was a “high chance” Jasmine would die — would prove fatal for her cat. But Jasmine recovered without surgery, so Postel went to the board to file a complaint and express her concerns over what she saw as a practice of pushing a costly procedure on a panicked pet owner. 

The board ruled that the whole incident was due to miscommunication and Postel being stressed about her cat; her complaint was ultimately dismissed. 

“It was a completely futile loss of my time, and they do not seem to really care,” she said of the board. “My cat could have had an extremely invasive surgery… These facilities need to have oversight.”

Postel said she believes that pushing for surgery, based only on inconclusive x-rays that hadn’t been reviewed by a radiologist, shows that they were acting in bad faith, pushing for a pricey surgery that many could not afford or would have to go into debt to pay off. 

“When you are in crisis mode, it is very difficult to think, and I think that is a breeding ground for people making a lot of money,” Postel said. 

But Postel was lucky: Her cat survived the encounter with a bad vet. The consequences for many Arizonans are much worse. 

Postel and Foulks are part of a larger group of people who are beginning to advocate for change to the system and laws around animals. They are spurred on by tragic tales of negligence by veterinarians who are not held to account by a regulatory body made up of their friends and colleagues. 

Frederick John Milens III has been taking charge on this issue as a “vet victim” himself. 

Milens began filing public records requests for complaints made to the board, to see if his own experience was an outlier or par for the course. What he found shocked him, and he soon started reaching out to others like Postel and Foulks about their experiences. 

He founded the Veterinary Victims League after the board accused him of making his own dog sick when rationalizing its decision to not pursue any disciplinary action in his case. 

Milens’ journey began after his dog, Cody, began having episodes of weakness. Cody was passed along from vet to vet, with differing ideas of what was wrong, and was given a multitude of procedures and medicine. The different vets could not agree on how to treat Cody, and he eventually died at home. None of the doctors admitted any responsibility for what had happened, according to Milens.

Some of the cases Milens found that were dismissed by the board or had minor disciplinary action included: 

• A dog having the wrong mass removed during a procedure
• A horse and foal dying under the care of a board investigator
• A vet shooting a a horse in the head after a failed attempt to euthanize it
• A dog suffering a broken jaw during a routine tooth cleaning
• A dog dying after a vet misdiagnosed parvo as pancreatitis
• A dog who died after surgery for a tumor that didn’t exist
• A euthanized dog’s ashes being thrown away due to “clerical error” 
• An employee who was bit by a dog and given animal medication
• And many more 

“[The board] seem to basically be attacking the complainant as they go through the process. And, if not attacking, trying to find any sort of thread to delegitimize the whole complaint,” Milens said of what he has gleaned from the hundreds of complaints and cases he has read through.

Members of the board don’t quite see it that way, though. 

“The thing that constantly surprises people that I speak with is that our state hears every complaint that is filed,” board chair Nicole Frost said in an interview with the Mirror. “To me, I guess from what I learned is that was surprising, and it showed a lot of consideration for the public, having their complaints be seen — and oftentimes not just by the board, but by the investigative committee.”

The board also pushed back on the accusation that a board filled with veterinarians — state law requires that five of the nine board members be licensed veterinarians, and one more is a certified vet technician — regulating their own industry is inherently biased against pet owners, saying that she believes the board has “diverse representation.”

“We’re just doing what everyone else does,” Victoria Whitmore, the board’s executive director, told the Mirror, noting that veterinarians are one of a slew of professions that are regulated by a state board filled with industry members. 

She compared the complaint process for veterinarians to a witness alerting police to a stolen car. It’s up to prosecutors to press charges, she said, not the witness. 

Frost has faced criticism from Milens for voting to dismiss 80% of the cases he has reviewed. 

Now, Milens and others are looking for other ways that people can seek a semblance of justice in cases of malpractice, but those solutions are easier said than done. 

Pets as property 

After her experience with the board, Foulks decided it was time to try a different approach. 

The attorney filed a civil lawsuit against the veterinarian alleging professional negligence. But Foulks learned that these types of cases, despite their likelihood of winning, come at a cost. 

In Arizona and in most of the country, animals are seen as property in the eyes of the law, the same as a person’s house or TV. This means that, even in cases where a person wins in court, they’re only entitled to the real value of that property. 

If a person spent $150 in adoption fees for a dog who was killed by a veterinarian’s malpractice, they would only be entitled to $150 in a civil case. The cost of filing a civil case in Maricopa County is $73, and each subsequent filing as the case proceeds is $40  — and that’s to say nothing of attorney’s fees, which are much steeper. 

“They are hard cases, and the outcome is not going to rain a great deal of money on anyone,” Adam Karp, an attorney who specializes in animal law in Washington said. Few lawyers are willing to take on these cases as, in most instances, they’ll be losing money instead of making it, Karp said. 

While many of the cases end in a settlement instead of going to trial, others can drag on for years, leading to more and more fees. It is similar to how malpractice works in the human medicine world, with cases often dragging on for several years or being similarly caught up in regulatory boards. 

And there is a growing trend of corporatization, incentivizing certain care and the influence of money in  veterinary medicine, similar to trends that have engulfed human medicine in recent decades. 

“My fear is that this has become a big money business,” Gail Mason, an Oregon-based veterinarian who was the expert second opinion on Foulks’ appeal, told the Mirror. “If [a vet is] on the fence about doing a test, and you know at the end of the day it is going to help you personally to make that test, it is in human nature to pull that trigger.”

Mason said that larger corporations and private equity firms are buying up more and more clinics and incentivizing vets to do procedures and tests that might not be fully medically necessary in order to bolster profits, leading to bad outcomes or wrong diagnoses. Add on that a large number of people are now opting to owning pets over having children and it creates a larger demand for higher-end care. 

That is also a reason why Mason and Karp think that the law needs to change. 

“So, naturally, when people lose their pets, they are emotionally devastated,” Karp said, adding that vets understand this. “Why else would you spend $5,000 on a pet to save them?…So, it is a bit of a hypocritical position for vets to take to ask for thousands and thousands, a premium based on the high emotional value to the patient, but if they kill the patient, they say, ‘No, no, no, only $100.’”

Mason agrees. 

“It is really unfair,” Mason said. “What is the market value of a 13-year-old labrador? But if it is the seeing-eye dog for that client, there is a huge disconnect there.” 

Foulks spent a tidy sum to adopt Greta, who was a purebred Swedish Vallhund, but that money would still not be anywhere near the costs of the litigation or emotional stress she has taken on. 

But changes to help pet owners could be in the offing, if a Republican state senator finds a way to turn a 2024 failure to change state law into a victory in 2025. 

Legislative action 

Veteran state lawmaker John Kavanagh, a Fountain Hills Republican, has gotten approximately 50 bills related to animal welfare passed since his first legislative session in 2007. 

Last year, Kavanagh sponsored two bills aimed at the issues brought up by Foulks, Milens and others that would have allowed courts to give larger monetary values to those who are successful in malpractice cases and add new definitions to veterinary malpractice. 

But the bills died at the hands of the “powerful lobbyists” for the American and Arizona Veterinary Medical Associations, Kavanagh said. But he’s not giving up: In 2025, both of the bills are back.

Senate Bill 1032 adds new definitions to veterinary malpractice to include withholding key medical information as well as destroying medical files. It would expand the definition of malpractice to include the altering of documents, making false statements, withholding medical information or delegating work to someone who is known to not have an expertise in veterinary medicine. 

And Senate Bill 1030 would allow anyone successful in suing a veterinarian for malpractice to be awarded the fair market value of their animal, as well as any medical costs that were incurred because of the veterinarian’s malpractice. 

The language is the result of “lengthy negotiation” with veterinarian industry stakeholders, Kavanagh said. 

Mason said she sees the bills as a good step forward and could help more people hold bad actors accountable for their actions. Karp noted that he has seen instances of veterinarians altering medical files in a way that is similar to how medical doctors have been found to do it in other malpractice cases. 

Kavanagh also agreed with advocates who are concerned about the amount of accountability that can come from a board that investigates its own colleagues. 

One of the cases reviewed by the Mirror was against a vet named Justin McCormick, who has faced several complaints, all of which have been dismissed. McCormick moonlights as an investigator for the board. He did not respond to a request for comment. 

“The problem you deal with is that most of the people who are qualified to deal with the actions of a profession are members of the profession, and obviously tend to be biased towards the profession,” Kavanagh said, noting that even the “public members” of the Veterinary Medical Examining Board tend to usually have connections to the profession. “The whole thing is slanted towards the occupation that is being regulated.”

Frost and Whitmore would not elaborate on if they’d support Kavanagh’s legislation, repeatedly evading the question by saying they are not “policy makers.” 

The board has discussed legislation impacting their profession before, specifically the previous versions of Kavanagh’s bills, with the agenda noting the board may “review, discuss, and take action” on the bills. Whitmore gave presentations on the bills to the board.

Kavanagh also isn’t very optimistic about the prospects of making meaningful changes due to the influence of the agricultural and livestock industries, which dogmatically oppose nearly every animal welfare proposal. 

“I would like to do more, but that is a difficult legislative hurdle to get over,” Kavanagh said. 

What now? 

Foulks and others the Mirror spoke to all voiced their dismay and distrust of an industry that they have relied on to care for animals that are valued members of their families, not mere property. That trust is not just eroded by bad actors, but by a system that refuses to keep those bad actors in check. 

While dismayed by the outcome, Foulks said she still believes that people should bring their complaints to the board, as it is in many cases the only avenue for justice. If nothing else, doing so creates a public record on that veterinarian, which other pet owners can view on the board’s website. 

Groups like Milens’ also are working to create databases for pet owners to better understand the vets they are taking their pets to. 

But they all still voice their frustration that a system meant to create a “deterrent effect” for bad behavior has led them to feeling defeated. 

For pet owners there are ways to make sure your pet is safe, though, according to Mason. 

The American Animal Hospital Association offers an accreditation program where facilities undergo a rigorous review that can take up to a year and is overseen by an outside third party. However, the process isn’t mandatory like medical hospital accreditations, and can be costly. 

There are approximately 30 AAHA accredited animal hospitals in the Greater Phoenix Metro area. 

Mason also suggests checking for complaints with the state’s board or even looking at reviews of veterinarians online. 

“Everyone is going to have some angry person who is going to put up a poor review, but you can get a gist just like you do on Trip Advisor,” Mason said. 

Something else that the people the Mirror spoke to seem to agree on is that they still support veterinarians but as faithful pet owners, they just want to see accountability and transparency. 

 “I’m not anti-veterinarian, of course — I’m anti people who don’t have integrity,” Mason said.