Restrictive Bill effecting sale of animals in California (Please read)

[frankykeno]

But rats are able to impregnant as early as 5 weeks of age??? So are they saying that a pet store must keep these rats till 8 weeks of age prior to being able to put them out for sale? I can see this becoming a problem unless all pet store employees are carefully seperating male/female rat siblings or there's going to be a lot of preggo young female rats around during that 3 weeks.

Otherwise a lot of the proposed legislation is very fair. If a pet shop has to be forced to give proper care and housing that they should have been providing in the first place, all the better for it. I don't think they addressed the needs of reptiles as much as I would have liked to have seen but at least they were mentioned for a change.

The only specific mention of feeder mice and rats I could find was this:

"1) Routine inspection of the animals, including feeder mice and
rats, in the retail animal outlet's custody for signs of stress,
illness, or injury."

Again I wish they had defined "feeder" clearly. They mention pet stores breeding for replacement stock but do not mention the pet stores that breed feeder mice and rats.

It'll be interesting to follow this.

[cassandra]

But rats are able to impregnant as early as 5 weeks of age??? So are they saying that a pet store must keep these rats till 8 weeks of age prior to being able to put them out for sale? I can see this becoming a problem unless all pet store employees are carefully seperating male/female rat siblings or there's going to be a lot of preggo young female rats around during that 3 weeks.

There is language in the proposed law that says rodents must segregated by gender at a very young age (can't remember age it said, but it's in there).

In my opinion, the language was clearly written with attacking the kitty and puppy farms in mind and getting better treatment in general for all animals in pet stores, which is a noble thing to do. It just seems that they didn't even consider feeder animals when defining the approach for rodents.

Something interesting that was mentioned on the cornsnakes forum discussion is that the law doesn't talk about fish at all - how about them tanks of hundreds of feeder fish? =P

This reminds me; was gonna call PetCo headquarters and ask them what they as an organization are doing against this proposed law.