It's always nice to be right. Our big story this week is Elanco finally launching its companion animal division – Lilly Companion Animal Health. Interestingly, one of the products that the company is getting ready to launch is a drug to treat separation anxiety for pets, as predicted in my previous post (below).

Anyway, this week is Animal Pharm's 25^th anniversary, so we all went out for a nice quiet drink, as you will be able to see from the picture of myself and our publisher Helena.

For the special supplement I wrote an article looking back at the last 25 years of mergers in the Animal Health industry. This was a nightmare – I was up until 2am on press day finishing it off.

It's amazing how many of the major companies have completely disappeared – once-famous names like Pitman-Moore, Coopers and Hoescht-Roussel, and how many remain. Intervet, Pfizer and Boehringer-Ingelheim to name a few.

Animal Pharm made a few predictions along the years about what would happen to these companies, and some of them were way off the mark.

The best one was in 1996, when we predicted that Schering-Plough was the company most likely to sell off its veterinary division. Instead, it bought Mallickrodt – a company more than twice its size – and SPAH has been among animal health's biggest companies ever since.

It just goes to show what a dicey business making predictions is.