Damn pet store

[mark129er]

No sooner did I speak the praises of my local petstore. Than today I went in to buy a rat.

1 Feeder rat full of mites
2 Multiple snakes all housed in same aquarium I think they were south american garter, russian water, other kind of water snake
3 accept hatchlings, beardies, balls etc Worker explained that they received 3 beardies and two died that same day. Multiple hatchling balls which were sold after like 2 meals.
I know that part of the problem is the breeder distributing animals far too young, but the petstore must share in the blame.

Sorry for the rant, mark

[Linds]

Originally posted by mark129er

I know that part of the problem is the breeder distributing animals far too young, but the petstore must share in the blame.

Actually many of the herps in pet stores do not in fact come from breeders, but rather from importers. A lot of the animals are WC or CH/CB, not captive bred. Wouldn't necessarily say a snake that has eaten two meals at store to be too young... generally snakes are sent on their way after around 4 on average from breeders, and chances are many of those animals have eaten before they arrived at the store. Stores do not accept animals to hold on to them, they aquire them to sell asap.

[mark129er]

The worker at the store said the balls were pretty much right from the egg.

[MouseKilla]

I've seen snakes too small to sell all over the place, in pet stores and from breeders. I think this is just greed. I've made the mistake myself when I was first buying snakes to buy the real young ones. No one seems to say anything to you when you do this. They don't ask if you have access to a reliable source of suitably sized prey. It's incredibly hard to find little, tiny pinkies and most new herpers have never heard of a pinky pump (hell, I hadn't heard of one until about a month ago). Personally I avoid the really small babies because they have a high mortality rate to begin with and they are very hard to feed. It is possible to care for a snake that's fresh out of the shell but breeders ought to be keeping them back until they are viable to the average customer not just the experts.

[meow_mix450]

well ive heard many storys like yours, ive even wrote some post about it too, but you cant do much. But most do come from breeders. All pet stores want is money, in the end everything turns out to be money. I just wish i could save them all from the pet store but you cant. i dont like pet stores very much, i only buy things from there cause i need crikets, i dont like to order online(dont feel safe), one of my comps have gotten hacked...so ya

Meow

[sapphire_moon]

I agree meow. I don't feel safe to order online. But alot of places will acept a money order.......or personal check. I've ranted about several places to. About the only thing you can do is "hang around" sometimes an when someone looks like they are going to buy something go over to the cage and rant quite loudly about how disgusting the cages are kept and how sick the animal looks. I've done this and one of the shift managers at a place actually told the "reptile person" to keep me away from the reptiles because I steered about 6 people away from buying some reps...............at another place I complained to the people there and they did call their vet, and they did take care of the caging. Some places are different than others. You can only hope they have someone working there that actually cares enough to learn about them or already do know something about them...