Stories of your bad local pet store?

[CoolioTiffany]

Ok, so I'm seeing threads of bad things happening to BPs and such at pet stores, and I'm really interested in hearing more. For some reason, it interests me to hear about this stuff. Probably because pet stores seem to have the most problems with keeping their animals in healthy conditions.

When I was at Petco a long time ago, I noticed their leopard gecko enclosure is in poor condition. There were tons of geckos in there, like it was seriously overpopulated with geckos. There was tons of feces in there, too. The geckos were just cramped together and sleeping, some (only 2 or 3) walking around, and there were crickets in there that looked a lot healthier than most of the geckos.

[MarkS]

Yeah, this is probably the best time ever to be posting negative comments about the herp trade on a public bulletin board.

But.... be that as it may, I can't honestly say that I know of any local pet stores that are mistreating their reptiles. Maybe because I just don't shop at places like that and I just don't know about them. There are a few places that I go to around here that specialize in reptiles and they give very good quality care.

[Jamie-n-Heith]

Our local reptile store is pretty nasty!! We only buy feeders there cause it is right around the corner from our house, we would never buy a reptile from this place. Their last shipment of baby BP's were all piled in a dirty cage together, (so sad) then the next week we went in to get our feeders 3 of the babies had died and were all flat looking and it smelled so awful!! It makes me feel so bad to see their cute little faces stuck in that nasty dirty cage

[DarkComeSoon]

I once saw 4 ball pythons and a red tail boa in a ten gallon halfway dead I went up to the guy and said you shouldnt house multiple snakes together especially different species. If the red tail boa has IBD it will be fatal to the pythons he told me all snakes will eventually get IBD and went back to feeding the fishes.

[Raptor]

Yeah, this is probably the best time ever to be posting negative comments about the herp trade on a public bulletin board.

But.... be that as it may, I can't honestly say that I know of any local pet stores that are mistreating their reptiles. Maybe because I just don't shop at places like that and I just don't know about them. There are a few places that I go to around here that specialize in reptiles and they give very good quality care.

Haha. I agree. I can't really think of any that takes horrid care of their animals. One of the places I frequent actually takes beautiful care of their animals. New shipments of animals aren't immediately put for sale; they're allowed to settle in. The cages are always clean. They don't usually keep multiple animals together, like snakes, but if they do, they're kept in the larger tanks and usually provide two hides for them. Always clean and only two or three people are allowed to deal with the reptiles; these people appear to be knowledgeable about animals. Unfortunately, this is just a local chain of stores.

[Outbreak]

Well a petco near where I live has 4-5 BP in the same tank with bad sheds 1 half-log hide, and what looked like tiny bugs crawling on them, I couldn't be sure though.

They also had a ferret display with a ton of ferrets and a crap ton of feces everywhere, in their fur /etc. They stunk so horrible. I ask the woman who worked there if they always stunk this bad and she said yes, ferrets always smelled this bad. I then went to another petco near my home that seems to take care of their animals pretty decently. The ferrets did not smell at all. In fact I walked past them twice without even noticing they were there.

[Foschi Exotic Serpents]

For the most part my local Petco is a good one with all around healthy animals. Only recently did i go in there for some bedding my herps store had run out of and i saw they have a young water dragon with an injured nose/lip. Poor thing looks like it ran into something and its upper lip is sticking up funny, is red and it keeps sticking its tongue out..

Everything else always seems clean & well taken care of there. The snakes too when they have them. Even the fish dept is excellent compared to my petsmart.

Petsmart on the other hand, always has unhealthy looking animals. Especially the fish. Which is a huge factor for me since i have a large aquarium. But i only buy my fish from a local small family owned aquarium store. Even so. I believe if any part of a store is unclean or has unhealthy/dead animals in it, it reflects the entire store even if every other dept looks good.

I generally stay away from those stores. I go to petco for my dog/cat food and the occasional bedding material. For everything else i go to the small family owned shops. Im lucky enough to have a herp shop and an aquaruim shop near me.

[PolishPython]

how ironic that I just come home from a Pets Plus and they have a spider ball in there in a small tank and it was only about 80 degrees in there. So i said to them dont you think that it should be around 90 in there. Get this they told me the temp was just fine, I wanted to buy it right there but due to other financial obligation was not able to. Another pet store around my house i get my feeders from has two red tail boas, the one day i went in and saw the snake wrapped around the light bulb said something to them and they told me the case to the bulb keeps comming off , wouldnt you think they would maybe uhh fix it. Man these places really get me aggrivated

[dc4teg]

oh i * SAW * might on this on albino corn snake crawing on its eye and i saw about 10 other mites and thats where i got my ball from but thats before they went down hill

[Simpson Balls]

I think this is so cruel I think if you want to work with animals and love a certain animal I say go for it be happy and work with them, also enjoy the fact your making money doing what you love. But if you just want a job and see a sign saying "Help Wanted Pet Shop" and you dislike animals and just want to make money I say you are one cruel person. I'm just saying this because if you hate animals the for sure you will go to work and not look after the animals a proper way.

Man, some people these days they just need some sense knocked into them!

Daniel