Ok, so my fiance and I went to a petstore here in Richmond to kill some time while my car was being worked on down the street and we noticed they had moved the reptiles to a new area. This store mostly deals with birds and rodents. We asked to see the reptiles and the pointed us in the right direction. The reptiles were now being kept behind the wall (kinda like a hallway). The back door was open, letting in the cool air, so I was kinda worried about that at first. Most petstores keep thier reptiles in heated reptile rooms.

The first reptile we looked at was a corn snake. He was very very odd. Near his tail end, he ballooned up, like he had swallowed something really big and it just sat there. It almost looked like a large tumor. We asked the guy and he said the snake had been seen by two vets in the area. One vet said the snake had a genetic disorder that caused water to build up over the muscle, causing the skin to ballon like it did. Another vet just called the snake fat. (this snake didn't look fat.) Also, this snakes cage was very dirty. Feces and such all over the carpet.

We looked at some other reptiles. Most were in ok conditions. Personally I think they could have been kept in bigger cages. We saw these large lizards in these big wooden enclosures. Not sure what it was (we didn't ask.) but he had two claws on either foot missing. The toe was there, but no claws. We thought this was wierd, as the other lizard had all of its claws. We turned around and saw what I think was a corn snake or something similar. It had the end of its tail missing. You could actually see exposed flesh. It didn't look infected, but I was kinda put off by all of this.

I know some petstores do rescue. I didn't see a price on any of these injured animals, but then again, there weren't prices on many of the healthy ones either. But still, it was very disturbing to see the lizard with the claws missing.