I honestly don't know how this place is still open and operating.
My roommate and I stopped in one weekend about a month ago to see about getting a hedgehog. He had previously been in a long, long time ago, and he spoke highly of the place, so I had high hopes myself. When we walked in, the smell of animal and urine hits you like a brick to the face. It's AWFUL. I've also never been in a pet store where all the animal tanks are just open wide for anyone to stick their hands in to, so they can get bitten, cross contaminate, or feed who knows what to the animals, all of which could have easily happened, because, while we were there, there were only 2 employees, and they were both behind the counter working with customers, and the store had maybe a dozen people in it, with a lot of them dipping their hands into the tanks to touch, pickup, and pet various animals. There wasn't a single bottle of hand sanitizer to be seen, either.
They also SELL puppies at grossly marked up prices from what I'm certain are puppy mills. The poor animals looked pitiful and petrified. If only we had the capability to take them all home and stop the cycle of selling puppy mill pups. Disgraceful. They sit in tiny display cages on wire racks with pans underneath that are filthy. It's just awful. How the humane society has allowed that to carry on is beyond me.
But it gets better...well, worse, actually. Since there was no way to speak to an employee about a hedgehog and I'd made it very clear to my roommate anyway that we should NOT buy anything from this horror show, we looked to see what was in the other open topped tanks. I had mentioned I wanted to own rats again some day soon since I've got a little bit of extra money now, and we saw they had a tank of rats that was open for all. Which is CRAZY. The tank WASN'T that deep, and rats are EXCELLENT climbers, and certainly they're smart enough to work together to escape (which I'll get back to later). My friend walked closer to the tank, which was NOT labeled "feeder", by the way, and there were several that were jumping up toward him, making it within an inch or two of the opening of the tank. Now, I mention that they're not labeled feeder because they DID have some marked feeder elsewhere, so I'm assuming they mean these for pets. Which is BANANAS, because they keep male and female together, and judging by size, the females are well past 5-6wks old, meaning they're almost certainly pregnant. So if you buy a female from there, SURPRISE! But still, this isn't the worst of it. There are SO many rats in this tank, well over a dozen, WAY too many for the size of it, and they're just crawling over one another, starting to gang up on one weaker rat, attacking it. So now there's blood all over the tank and the rats because they've skinned this poor thing's tail to the bone, meanwhile, the employees are now just sitting behind the counter shooting the breeze with someone as it's calmed down in the store. There also may have been one entirely dead rat in the tank, too, because the little all white fellow never moved (you'll see them at the top of the pic I add). I snapped a pic and am still trying to figure out who I call to report this place. Many of the rats were sneezing, which means they're probably sick. Lots of porpyhrin all around, so even more signs of sickness. Honestly wouldn't be surprised if the poor little things had mites, too.
We looked through the rest of the store just to see what horrors awaited. There was a bird out of its cage...on purpose. The employees would yell at customers not to touch the bird...not that they were, just to make sure they could read the sign that said not to touch it, I guess? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ They had other birds in there just screeching up a storm. Lots of birds in tiny cages.
The fish tanks were alright, I guess? In that they weren't horrendously filthy or filled entirely with dead fish. I saw some life in them.
When we finally left, as I was trying to suppress the tears that were coming to my eyes for the animals enduring their existence in this hellhole, I noticed that nearly every single one of the few types of bagged pet food they sell on the racks near the door (on the wall of the front of the store inside) had chew holes in them that they'd taped over, so OBVIOUSLY keeping the tanks open to the rats ISN'T working for them, and they're STILL doing it AND trying to sell you food that's potentially been contaminated with who knows what at this point.
Like the screeching birds in this store, it honestly seems like EVERY animal that has the unfortunate luck to end up here is screaming, in its own way, to be released. I hope to dog the health department, humane society, or another such group shuts them down QUICKLY. DO NOT SHOP HERE. read more