When you have large breeders dumping their over stock to these chain stores, legislators who consider reptiles the devil, and a complete lack of attention because they are not cute and cuddly in the eyes of the general public, you have this going on.
Until we regulate the breeding of reptiles, ban wholesale flipping of them, and restrict ownership to anyone without a clue what they are getting, we are going to have this problem. The problem is there is no control at any level outside of personal responsibility which decreases as soon as money becomes part of the equation. What do you think someone like Brian Barczyk does with his normal BPs and leopard geckos he can't sell? Someone like him doesn't cull them, he sells them to pet chains.
I get this is a horrible thing to have happen but until we stop just treating reptiles like objects and start giving them the basic respect that they need, this is going to continue and no amount of writing to corporate is going to put an end to it because to them these are just cheap things to make a buck on. For every serious reptile keeper, there are 100 irresponsible ones who see a cheap starter pet that they don't care if it dies. You have even worse situations where someone has a big heart but either does not have the means or the time to realize they are taking care of this pet wrong.
Education needs to go so much farther than proper husbandry, it needs to be exposed that the vast majority of the reptile pet trade is an order of magnitude worse than any puppy mill and far too many people blindly perpetuate it.
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