At first glance, Bento and Koby don’t have much in common. Bento is a gentle 9-year-old husky, always ready to extend a paw for a handshake, and Koby is an anxious 2-year-old rottweiler, still adjusting to the hustle and bustle of the Lynchburg Humane Society.
But their stories follow a similar path. Both are facing medical challenges: Koby is being treated for frequent seizures, and Bento is recovering from alopecia, long-standing allergies and a yeast infection that have all led to patchy fur and irritated skin. And Koby and Bento found themselves as neighbors at the Lynchburg Humane Society for the same reason: Their owners surrendered them, citing financial issues, including vet costs.
It’s a story that’s become all too common, said Jill Mollohan, executive director of the Lynchburg Humane Society. As veterinary costs have skyrocketed in recent years, she said, families are finding it harder to pay for critical care and keep their pets at home.
The Lynchburg Humane Society hopes to ease that problem by opening a new clinic that will bring the services of a traditional vet office and a high-volume spay and neuter surgery center under one roof at the humane society’s current shelter — and make those services affordable with flexible payment plans. Construction began in July and is scheduled to be completed in November 2026, Mollohan said.
The affordable care clinic should have ripple effects across the greater Lynchburg area, where there aren’t other clinics of its kind, Mollohan said.
“We really want to help people keep their pets at home. And we’re also looking to help shelters, because the more animals we can help keep at home and out of the shelter, the less euthanasia that will happen across the region,” she said. “It’s an answer for everybody. It’s the future.”
When it comes to veterinary care, ‘this system is broken’
The Lynchburg Humane Society isn’t alone in seeing more and more pets surrendered due to high vet costs, said Aimee St.Arnaud. She’s the founder of Open Door Veterinary Collective, a nonprofit that aims to increase access to veterinary care through education and research, and she helps to run two affordable clinics in Ohio and North Carolina.
“We’re seeing an increase in shelter intake, and we’re hearing anecdotally that a large reason for that is because people are being forced into having to make that decision because they can’t afford veterinary care,” she said. “It is really forcing us all to get together to look at what we are going to do and how we are going to remake this system, because this system is broken as it currently is.”
Since 2020, the cost of veterinary care has increased by about 40%, which is almost twice the rate of overall inflation in the same time period, as reported by NPR in October.
Just over half of pet owners have not brought their pets to the vet or have declined care that was recommended by a vet in the past year, according to a 2025 study by Gallup and PetSmart Charities. Among those pet owners, 71% said the decision was a financial one.
Many factors are contributing to bigger bills at the vet, St.Arnaud said. In part, she said, it’s simply more expensive to run a practice now than it was before the pandemic, with rising costs for pharmaceuticals, medical supplies and staff wages and insurance.
Corporate consolidation has created a profit-driven environment that also contributes to an uptick in vet costs in some areas, St.Arnaud said.
About 75% of specialty and emergency clinics and 25% of general practice vet clinics in the country are owned by corporate consolidators, as reported in 2023 by the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association. “Those working in corporate practices reported feeling more pressure than those in private practice to generate revenue and see more clients per shift,” the study reads.
Combined, those factors lead to vet costs that few families can comfortably afford to pay up front, St.Arnaud said. She said she’s not surprised when she sees pet surgeries that cost $15,000 or more.
“I feel like everybody is just one emergency away from not being able to afford care. And to me, having a pet shouldn’t be a luxury. It should be something that we all get to enjoy,” she said.
Affordable vet care can ease stress on the entire animal welfare system, St.Arnaud said.
“When groups are opening these clinics, they’re really going upstream to the problem at the root, instead of being reactive,” she said. “They’re addressing the problem where it starts: keep pets in homes with their families where they belong, and help vets in the field that are burnt out and stressed from not being able to fix the situation.”
Affordable care at the Lynchburg Humane Society
The Lynchburg Humane Society has experience with offering affordable care, Mollohan said, but the new clinic will allow for a much-needed expansion in services.
The humane society currently runs an affordable spay and neuter clinic in Evington, about a 25-minute drive away from its shelter, and offers some affordable vet services there. But demand has outpaced the clinic’s capacity, Mollohan said — even though it performs about 40 of the surgeries per day for a total of 8,000 per year. Spay and neuter surgeries are booked out for the next five months, and other vet services can’t be offered “on the scale that’s needed” due to limited space and logistical challenges, she said.
“What it boils down to is that we are not able to fulfill the Lynchburg Humane Society’s need, or the community’s need, or other shelters’ needs with our current setup,” Mollohan said.
The Lynchburg Humane Society sheltered about 3,000 pets in the 2025 fiscal year, according to its most recent community impact report, after they were surrendered, brought in by animal control officers or transferred from shelters where they were at risk for euthanasia.
The new clinic will serve those animals in the shelter’s care along with pets of community members in need, Mollohan said.
The 12,000-square-foot office will be built next to the current shelter and connected to it by an indoor walkway. It will feature four exam rooms, a pharmacy, an isolation area for contagious pets, advanced technology for x-rays and surgeries, and other areas needed to offer a variety of routine wellness care and more advanced emergency responses, Mollohan said.
The new clinic will replace the current spay and neuter clinic in Evington and the “make-do” clinic that provides care for shelter animals in the cramped back rooms of the humane society, which were originally designed as storage and office spaces, Mollohan said.
Having all of the services in the same, intentionally designed space will aid communication and collaboration between vets and ease the flow of intake and care, Mollohan said.
Humane society staff are still working on creating a model for flexible pricing, Mollohan said, but an initial idea is to have a tiered pricing system where pet owners can pay at whatever level is feasible for them. Staff would use a family’s income as a guide for pricing, she added, but would work on a case-by-case basis to ensure they understand factors outside income that influence a family’s ability to pay for vet care.
The goal would be for donations to offset the loss from reduced-price services, Mollohan said.
The affordable clinic will offer payment plans, too, Mollohan said, in which pet owners will be billed a small amount each month to cover the cost of larger procedures rather than face the burden of paying hundreds or thousands of dollars on one bill.
Successes and challenges in the affordable care field
St.Arnaud said pay-over-time plans are the best practice for affordable-care clinics because they are sustainable for both the pet owner, who can control how vet bills hit their bank account, and the clinic, which can recoup the full cost of services rather than drain resources by subsidizing care.
Another best practice, she offered, is advocating for shared decision-making in the exam room — meaning that vets and pet owners work together to find care options that make sense for personal budgets and values rather than prescribing a one-size-fits-all plan.
Numerous clinics in Virginia — notably the SPCA clinics in Virginia Beach and Richmond — have used those models for the past two decades and proven they can work, said Sharon Quillen Adams, chair of the Virginia Alliance for Animal Shelters.
Even so, she said, it’s not easy keeping care accessible when the market pushes costs in the other direction; vigilant outreach, fundraising, documentation and goal-setting are needed to stay on track.
“It’s an important and essential service for every community to have a low cost veterinary clinic,” Adams said. “But there are challenges.”
The biggest challenge for affordable clinics today, Adams said, is likely the nationwide shortage of vets.
A 2022 study by the American Association of Veterinary Medical Colleges reported that “significant shortages of veterinarians exist across all sectors of professional activity and at all levels of specialization,” with estimates of up to 3,000 more open jobs than veterinarians available to hire.
Nonprofit veterinary clinics are often not able to offer the same pay and benefits that for-profit clinics are, Adams explained, which can make recruiting difficult.
The Lynchburg Humane Society currently employs two vets — one at the shelter and one at the Evington clinic — and hopes to have a total of five vets at the new clinic when it opens in 2026, Mollohan said. She’s more than willing to hire new graduates, she said, and she hopes that people will be inspired by the humane society’s mission enough to take a chance on the new endeavor.
As the clinic is constructed, hiring and fundraising are the staff’s main priorities for 2026, Mollohan said.
The $7.5 million capital campaign for the clinic was launched in August 2024 and has raised about $5 million in donations so far, said Michelle Thomas, the Lynchburg Humane Society’s director of development. It covers construction and “everything else we need to open the doors,” she said, such as medical equipment.
“The outpouring of support speaks to the work we do here and the respect we have in the community,” Thomas said. “But we need to get to the finish line and raise that additional $2.5 million.”
Services with regional reach
Within 50 miles of the Lynchburg Humane Society, two other care providers actively offer accessible services, according to a database of affordable pet resources. The Bedford Humane Society offers a shuttle to Roanoke’s Angels of Assisi clinic once a month for affordable spay and neuter surgeries, and Riverside Veterinary Hospital in Goode offers financing for veterinary services.
The Lynchburg Humane Society’s new clinic will be the first of its kind in the Lynchburg region, Mollohan said, because it’s combining the services of a high-volume spay and neuter clinic and a traditional veterinary office under one roof with affordable pricing.
The high-volume surgery clinic is a critical resource for the region already, Mollohan said. In the 2025 fiscal year, the Evington location served pets from 20 counties. Less than 15% of the pets that were spayed and neutered came from Lynchburg.
Expanding surgery options at the new clinic will shorten the waitlist for services — currently at five months — and ensure that the Lynchburg Humane Society can continue to serve rural areas that don’t have access to surgery centers, Mollohan said.
The closest spay and neuter clinics are in cities like Richmond, Charlottesville, Roanoke and Harrisonburg, Mollohan said. But they have long waitlists too, she added, because they care for the pets in their surrounding rural counties just as Lynchburg’s clinic does.
Accessible spay and neuter surgeries are the main solution for keeping the number of homeless pets in any region to a minimum, Mollohan said.
It’s hard to predict exactly what the other regional ripple effects will be, Mollohan said, but she hopes that the affordable care option makes current pet owners feel supported and helps prospective pet owners feel confident about their decision to adopt.
“Knowing that there’s a place right next door that offers affordable vet care, I think that that’s going to help a lot with that decision to say ‘yes’ to adopting from any shelter around here,” she said.