I feel comfortable dealing with him in person. It is actually my husband who is, but a good friend of Mark's, is good friends with Fred. He vouched for him quite a bit and got their side of the Spca incident. They did not like the fact that the store housed their herps in racks. And Fred definately lost a lot; healthy, gravid females were taken and put down because they were lying on their sides like they often do, for example. I am always leary about news stories that dramatize the worst in a case. And I guess that there was a disgruntled former employee involved.
Whatever the case, their store and animals look great now. I talked to Fred personally last week, and looked over a bunch of his snakes; all were the picture of health visually. I received great customer service from Fred, who talked BPs with me for maybe an hour or so, much of that before he knew that I was a paying customer.
I am all for buying snakes over the internet, but in this case, this will be the first morph that I was actually able to see live before purchasing. It was great. The only problem was selecting her from the others!
I really do not think that their store would be around today if the Spca had such a valid case against them. I know of one store that had been on Harlem that got closed down because they truly were a scumbucket place; I think that the Spca realized that they were overreacting and uneducated in herps, and the rest is history. I looked through Fred's store (Pets Plus) and all I saw were uncrowded feeder-breeding tanks (mice and rats) clean fish tanks (another rarity in the weatern NY pet-store scene) and healthy BPs.