Texans filed 1,662 complaints against veterinarians last year, nearly double the year before. On Oct. 20 the state board that decides them closed about 150 without any discipline, in block votes that named no case aloud, over the objections of four pet owners who had come to ask it to look again.
Those votes are not where most complaints end. The materials for the same meeting list 68 more, closed over the summer and labeled “non-jurisdictional” — shut before they reached any of the four lists the board voted on, and without a board vote at all.
A stated reason sits beside each case number, and most do not describe a limit on what the board may regulate. Thirty-two say the allegations do not amount to a violation of the Veterinary Act or the board’s rules, which could mean the conduct falls outside the law, or that somebody judged it did not break it. Eight read only one way: five give “No violation” and three “Insufficient evidence”. Seven were closed because the complaint was anonymous, one as a “Civil matter”.
State law does not plainly leave that call to staff. The provision requiring baseless, unfounded or out-of-jurisdiction complaints to be thrown out says “the board shall dismiss the complaint” (§801.2052). Across the year the enforcement director reported 283 of the 1,662 as non-jurisdictional — about one complaint in six, gone before the nine people the governor appointed see them.
Dismissal is the ordinary ending here, not the exception. Kelly Phelps, the board’s general counsel, told members it disposed of 634 cases in the fiscal year that closed Aug. 31 and issued 147 orders against licensees: roughly one disciplinary order for every four cases closed, by the Dispatch’s own arithmetic.
The four who spoke were not making a statistical argument. A physician described a 10-year-old Persian cat euthanized in November 2025 with oral cancer she said three veterinarians failed to work up, and asked the board to reopen five complaints it had already closed.
“I respectfully ask the board to review these five dismissals.”
A woman said a spay at a Mansfield clinic left her dog with an ovary and a cancer risk. A wolf sanctuary in Navasota that lost two wolves under anesthesia wanted “accountability and some form of public disclosure” on the record of a veterinarian its reviewers had declined to fault. A fourth argued that investigators and owners are shown different versions of the same file: “A medical record is not a pick and choose narrative.”
Even the dismissals the board does vote on are mostly not its own work. Ninety-nine came off the medical-review list — the stage where veterinarians the board designates read the patient records and judge whether the care fell short. State law lets those reviewers dismiss a complaint themselves and asks only that “the dismissal must be approved by the board at a public meeting” (§801.2055).
Two files did not come out as staff proposed. After an executive session of about 40 minutes, the board pulled one case off the staff-conference list and one off medical review and sent each to an informal conference — the settlement meeting where a veterinarian sits down with staff — rather than close it. Two, out of about 150.
The sharpest objection was procedural. Anita Roth, a regular at the board’s meetings since it was placed under the licensing department in 2023, has waited six and a half years for an explanation of why her complaint over a dog’s death was closed. State law entitles her to one: the board must give a complainant, in plain language, “each reason the conduct alleged in the complaint did or did not constitute grounds for the imposition of a penalty” (§801.208). Nobody answered her.
The board’s own account of the year is a story of catching up. Mike Tacker, its director of enforcement, called it “the busiest year in enforcement that I’ve seen since” 2018, and said it carried 412 open investigations into the year and ended with 176: “we were able to knock that number down”. Inspections ran to 1,617, against 59 in what he called “one of the horrible years”.
Nobody at the table said why complaints doubled, and none of these figures is published outside the board’s own meeting materials. No trade group or legislator has taken a public position on how this board disposes of complaints — though complainants have. In December 2020 Jodi Ware, whose own complaints had been dismissed in turn, asked the Sunset Advisory Commission to strip the board and hand its work to the licensing department. That is roughly what the Legislature did in 2023.
The board meets next on Jan. 19. Its temporary attachment to the licensing department expires Sept. 1, 2027 — outlived by most of the 1,662 complaints.
Two contested cases, both accepted. The board adopted the administrative law judges’ proposals for decision in two cases heard at the State Office of Administrative Hearings, one of them with citation changes in the acceptance letter. It took no oral argument, having heard the cases already. Officers re-elected, committees unchanged. Sandra “Lynn” Criner was re-elected vice president and Victoria Whitehead secretary, both unopposed, and the presiding officer kept every standing committee as it stood, saying he had received no request to change. A request nobody expected. In the last minute of the meeting a member asked that a future agenda take up suicide among veterinarians, describing a recent graduate’s death four months into an internship. The chair agreed to consider it. It is the only item on the morning’s record that nobody voted on.