Pet shops or local reptile breeders?

[Nephil]

I have looked into a few local pet stores about an hour in my vicinity, namely reptile specialty stores. Despite good reviews online, they have all been, as a rule, shockingly terrible. I don't throw around the word animal abuse often, but the last place I went to fit that bill (cohabbing iguanas--by the way, they are and were illegal to sell then! A terrified live rat inside of a ball python cage with no hides, fungus gnats in all of the enclosures, aspen bedding or literally no bedding with just glass on the bottom, and uh, a black nearly dead chameleon in a taped up screen cage sitting outside their front door?). And they have a 4.5 star rating out of like over a hundred reviews. The owner was also clearly on drugs lol, and had a criminal record when I looked into it further. Florida. Or at least, my area of Florida.

So yeah. I could have purchased an animal from there because I felt bad for them. But I would have been giving that guy money, as well as likely introducing diseases to my reptiles at home. Who deserves your money: a pet store owner whose goal is to maximize profits, or a small breeder who specializes in taking care of a smaller number of species and actually knows how to take care of them? Like, I know not all breeders are the best either, but the good ones are just reptile nerds who want to spread the word about a specific breed or morph or whatever.

A specific kind of person will start a pet shop. They will be more business-minded and profit-minded, viewing the animals more like objects to sell. A local smaller-scale breeder, while they also sell their animals, are less on that large scale, automated kind of thing. The breeders I have talked with at expos (actual breeders, not some exhibiting store that has employees at the show), love to talk about the animals and have a ton of knowledge and enthusiasm. We have some really great, really nice local BCI and ball python breeders (unfortunately not species I was looking into purchasing at the time). Pet store owners can be like any variety of friendly, hostile, drug-addled, uninformed... lol. I don't know. My pet store experiences have been truly bad.

Dang, the reptile side of alot of pet shops is really messed up ngl