Stories of your bad local pet store?

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.

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.

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 :(

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.

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Originally Posted by 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.

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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.

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.

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.

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

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 :(

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

If I may put out, that the pet store I work for is probably the only pet store around me that actually takes care of their pets, whether it be feeders to reptiles.


Monster Pets, Petsmart, Petco, Precious Pets, and the local petstore in our community town center are disgusting and you can tell the animals aren't takin' care of. The smells and the sights are just enough to make you sick.

The petstore in the towncenter got in a baby BP the same day and time I was taking a browse... with scabbing all over it. It was triangular and didn't wanna come out of it's ball. It just sat like that, it had to be in pain just had to. Not to mention the guy wouldn't even touch it to take it out of the little container it came in! The poor thing was close to dying, if it hasn't already it would be a surprise but haven't gone back since I've seen that. I would have taken it but I wouldn't be able to handle a dying snake emotionally and I'm sure the vet bill would have been expensive to get her/he stable. I won't even go into the dogs, the guinea pigs.... and all because it's digusting. Like the guinea pig water looks like it hadn't been cleaned for months.

Precious Pets, just has TOO many pets to take care of, so newer things are prioritized over others, since they apparently don't have enough money to care for them all. Which makes me think, "well then STOP getting more animals in!" Which means the ones prioritized least get less attention. At least the BPs here don't normally look that bad.

Petsmart, Petco are not the greatest obviously. I've come across a lot of inaccurate advice and the ball pythons that I have come across have been triangular and underfed. I even had a gentleman come into my pet shop and show use a dying BP that couldn't even wrap around your wrist or hold it's own, that he got from petsmart.

Monster Pets.... I don't know what I can possibly say, but this place is horrid. A chinchilla jammed in a 12.5 by 12.5 container... the height no more the like 12 inches as well.... BPs jammed in a slightly smaller container, maybe eight or nine together! All not looking good... large reptiles in the small sized containers just the same as the snakes'... I mean like large adolescent beardies and large monitors in 12 by 12 (or smaller) containers. Not to mention their dogs are sick. I think the birds had it better there. O.o;

The Pet Supplies Plus in my home town is decent with their snakes, occasionally they will house more than one together but they have multiple hides and clean water (something a lot of chain stores don't)
However, the same chain where I am now is horrible, they had 3 snakes together with one half log and one had a horrible shed, 90% of his skin was still on him in pieces. The employees didn't seem to know what to do at all.

Both towns are college towns, so its the same demographic of employee.
I've tried applying there, as did one of my other friends who is pet-savvy and both said they weren't interested. Actually, the fact that we did have prior knowledge seemed to be a turn-off. :-(, they seem to care more about profit than care.

My petsmart is horrible.
They keep 6 Beardie babies in a 6 gallon tank.
3 baby bps in a tank the size of my bps hide.
4 turtles in a 20 gallon long with 2 inches of dirty water.
20 mice covered in little bugs, with 3 dead mice.
3 rats in a 10 gallon
4 chameleons in a 5 gallon tank.
3 Red tailed boas in a 10 gallon just a hide, no water bowl.
and some other stuff

I've had a few bad pet store experiences. One was a pet store in Wise, Va. They kept about 15 anoles in a 10g tank with blue sand. I have a picture somewhere because we were trying to take evidence to have the store shut down or at least warned. I can't remember that much but I do remember the anoles either had a small water dish that was dry or they didn't have one at all. The sand was littered with feces and dead crickets that were obviously too big for the little anoles. Many of them looked emaciated and sickly.

They had some puppies there as well. One was a little golden pup who was obviously sick. Very lethargic and was just acting like he was not feeling good. We asked to hold him and he just cuddled up to me and gave me a little lick. I was almost tempted to bring him back to my dorm room. I approached the man behind the counter (all the cages were dirty and 1/2 the animals didn't have water or food) and he was sitting behind the counter reading a magazine) and told him the puppy was sick. He said the puppy was fine (That puppy was not healthy!) We left and came back the next day. The little puppy was gone and he said someone had bought him. :(

I also had another pet store that kind of sucked. They sold a guy a red tail boa and told him in was a ball python. :confused::confused: (Wouldn't you realize that the tail of the snake is not red?) Apparently the guy at the store told him the tail would turn red as the snake aged.

There have been a lot of good stores around here though. Noah's Pets was awesome but they had to shut down a while ago. We went to that store for years. I'm really sad its gone. The Petsmarts and Petcos around here are pretty good as far as animal care. While they do sometimes put too many animals per cage, the cages are always clean and the animals have fresh water and food. I'm actually hoping to get a job with either Petsmart or Petco to work with the small animals and reptiles. :) (Though the Petsmart employees tend to be completely useless in the information department when it comes to reptiles and small animals. Petco employees have some knowledge but sometimes its wrong info)