Another sad pet store experience

["Red-eye"_Matt]

We (myself and my girlfriend Baby "G") were at a pet store here in Nova Scotia last night, and I must say it was the worst trip we have ever made to one. The people that run the store have only recently started keeping reptiles. The have an aquarium rack built in which they keep all of their tanks. The thing is that all of the tanks a 10 gallons only. Now this would not be so bad but the amount of animals that they keep in tsome of these tanks is absolutely ludicris. There was at least 10 full grown golden geckos in one. I know that the tanks are smaller because they are only temporary housing but that is WAY to much in my opinion.

Also, they do not provide any type of heating or special lighting on any of the cages. We were looking at there poor bearded dragon tank and all they had was a flourescent light for them. Also we noticed that one of the dragons was dead. He was so skinny that it didn't look like he had eaten at all from the time he arrived there. We told the women who was working at the time and she said "No, he is just sleeping. He was moving around earlier." I told here that we keep reptiles as pets and that we are familiar with what the animals should be like. She totally ignored us. My girlfriend said that the beardie looked like he hadn't eaten and the girl replied that that was the case and that they were thinking of moving him to his own tank. The sad truth is he was already gone by that point. And they are then charging $249.99 for these half-dead/sick animals. It made me sick.

We also noted a leopard gecko in the same situation in another tank and at least 3 other geckos that if they were not already dead they were on their way out. They have no idea what the care is of these animals and it absolutely infuriated me that they just blew off the comments that we made like we don't know anything.

So today my girlfriend called the SPCA and they took her statement (anonymously of course) and said that they would be alerting animal control to go take a look at the store for themselves. We also plan on calling animal control to tell them that we have the spare equipment so that we could take in one or two of these animals to rehabilitate them if they would like.

Thanks for letting me rant about this. I know we have all had bad experiences in the past with pet stores but this had to be our worst yet. I can't believe that those people can remain in operation when they are keeping there animals in those kinds of conditions.

Matt