Most disturbing pet store visit to date

[purplemuffin]

Honestly, one of the worst places I've ever been to. Not just regular abuse, but weird, scary issues. I'm in the process of contacting several people to report these guys, but man this was just messed up. I would have gotten pictures, but they had a very clear no picture policy, and since they caught me trying they wouldn't stop watching me. Maybe I can try again next time.

First, the dogs. They smelled..wrong. Something just smelled awful and they were all sleepy and sick looking. One of them had pink eye in both eyes.

Birds.. Each finch was housed alone and you could see them going crazy, one had almost no feathers left, another was so desperate for contact he was right up against the glass desperately chirping with anyone who passed by. All alone in a filthy cage. The cockatiels had bloodstained feathers near their vent, I have no idea what caused that. One of them also clearly had fatty liver disease with neon green feces caked on his feathers.

The ball python we saw was the skinniest I had ever seen--Bone thin, you could see the ribs. His face had so much shed skin stuck to him that his face had started to change SHAPE, it was just squeezed so tight from who knows how long. He was clearly blind in one eye, and we thought he was dead. Only when nathan leaned down and put his hand against the glass that the ball python moved--in hunting mode, desperate for anything to eat. Broke my heart.

Their tank of hermit crabs was like a massacre, almost all corpses with one or two actually moving ones. The rest of the reptiles were in improper enclosures, including a green iguana on bark it had clearly already ingested and gotten impacted on. The leopard gecko had clearly vomited several times and it had not been cleaned. Their FROG cages..Well, the water was green and brown. I didn't even realize there was a frog in there until we startled it. And then the water moved..and we saw there were more frogs, not living. You just couldn't see through the water to see them.

Good lord. And it doesn't even stop there. They had fish. Not just regular fish, but weird and exotic ones as well, they had sea urchins and eels and such. There was a discus fish...I... I can't even tell you what was wrong with it. I don't know what happened, it's like they broke it's back. It was no longer a disk shape, but had a crushed spine and could hardly swim. It looked freaky. Some of their fish looked okay--oscars looked fine. But other fish were covered in fungus or just sitting there with their rotting dead tank mates.

Of course they had bettas too--only solid reds and solid blue veiltails. All of them had clamped fins beyond anything I had seen before, it was like they had strings for fins, awful. Watched one person refill a cup--with chlorinated water.

The rats were cramped. Each cage was about a five gallon amount of floor space--with 6-9 adult rats in each one. Filthy, poop outnumbered substrate. They were climbing on the water bottles and furniture to get away from the ground.


Of course the people working there didn't care about the complaints. Believe it or not, this store has been shut down three times before, but keeps reopening..somehow. They clearly aren't learning there lesson. It's disgusting.


I'm trying to get the people who own the mall itself involved so that that store will no longer be welcomed there. It was just messed up what I saw.

I'm totally furious. I can't believe after being shut down that these people could manage to somehow get a license to run a petstore again. Who all should I contact to get these guys shut down for good?