Pet store question

Last night I had to stop and get some crickets and super worms but didn't have time to run around so grabbed them at petco. The snake's looked especially bad even by petco standards and it got me to thinking. Does anyone know the statistics when it comes to how many reptiles and amphibians these pet stores go through due to dying and being replaced?

I used to work at a pretty crappy exotic pet store where they would import about 400 baby ball pythons every season... probably close to half died just at the store... I'm sure a lot of them died after they were purchased as well.

There is no way Petco is going to release details on the numbers of animals that die in their care, some their fault, some not!

I worked full time for a family owned and ran shop, they have a very low die rate, like probably less then 10% a year.

Chain stores are a "in and out" set up. Get em in and get em out as fast as possible, so they probably dont even keep track of the die off rates.

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Originally Posted by Nightmare Creatures

I worked full time for a family owned and ran shop, they have a very low die rate, like probably less then 10% a year.

Chain stores are a "in and out" set up. Get em in and get em out as fast as possible, so they probably dont even keep track of the die off rates.

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That doesn't make sense from a business standpoint. They'd have to know how much money they were spending, on what and why. Right? At least it seems that way to me...

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Originally Posted by Sputnik

There is no way Petco is going to release details on the numbers of animals that die in their care, some their fault, some not!

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Yeah I'm sure they wouldn't release it but I find it hard to believe they wouldn't keep track of it.

I worked at a large family owned. We had a massive variety of animals, some species required an excessive amount of care just to keep alive. We rarely lost any animals, and the ones we did lose we had no business trying to sell becuase we ourselves knew too little about them (One that comes to mind was what I think was a Camel Spider or soemthing like it. It never ate and required envoronmental conditions we had a very hard time replicating.)

In the pet/vet industry it is very well known that the massive chains like petco and petsmart do a VERY bad job keeping thier animals fed and alive.
I remember taking a trip to one of these branches once and there were probably 15 or 20 dead parakeets sitting in the bottom of thier large show cage.

Also, i'm not so sure about where they get thier animals as well, I can see them cutting corners so that they can keep costs low.

My guess is easily 60% mortality rate...not including any returned animals.

I saw a horrifically scrawny, poorly shed (it looked like it tried to shed, and got NOTHING off) ball python at PetCo once. It was so sad looking...I wanted dearly to buy it and take it home with me and at least try to nurse it back to health.

But I hadn't the cash for the poor little guy and had other reps to feed. :(

At the petco across from the Reptile expo in Richmond you could go buy a sickly corn or king for five times what one would have spent at the show. It is sad how these chains do reptiles. The BP they had had a 15% humidity reading. Poor snakes!