Pet Store and Pet Ownership Horrors -

[Bugaboo]

We were clogging up the retail horror thread with stories of stupid idiots who shouldn't even be in charge of a pet rock and people who have no business selling animals so I made this thread. Some story highlights from me include:
-People taking healthy wild animals in and asking me what to feed them (this is illegal in my province btw)
-Boy asking me what to feed a baby snapping turtle (!!!)
-Hillbilly tarantula neglect
-Baby iguanas being sold in pet shops
-Puppy mills
-Puppies being sold at garage sales
-Broken toe pet shop lizard
-Telling a family that a common pleco was going to stay small (spoiler: they don't)
-Extreme hermit crab abuse, neglect and misinformation
-Water ammonia levels of 8.8, still confused why fish are dying
-80% water change. Why did my neon tetras drop dead shortly after?
-"WHAT CAN I KEEP IN MY FISH BOWL" (spoiler: nothing unless you want a betta and to have to change the water every single day) (spoiler: they never change the water)

 

[Goofy Logic]

People who own horses can be some of the most arrogant, stuck up pricks one can encounter. If you have horses yourself, they can view you as competition and become even more arrogant. We had one woman call mom and tell her it was a PRIVILEGE for us to hire the farrier on the day he was supposed to be working on HER horses (It was a short appointment, and the farrier had lots of time before having to go to the woman).

One of the biggest mistakes horse owners can do is buy alfalfa hay. Cattle (especially dairy cattle) need lots of nutrients in their feed because of their odd digestive cycle, and so Alfalfa hay is considered superior over grass hay (It doesnt help that alfalfa hay is almost double the price of grass hay, and some owners have that "Special Snowflake" mentality about their horse). Alfalfa is a legume, meaning it is full of nitrates, and horses are extremely sensitive to nitrogen. So a lot of horse owners buy Alfalfa hay , feed nothing but alfalfa to them, then wonder why the poor horse gets laminitus (founder) and is crippled for life.

 

[Rabbit Bones]

I have so much fodder for this thread. I'm going to start with a warning though. I worked at the most back water vet clinic in town, for the most insane woman I've ever met. Most of my stories are probably going to be a combination of people who shouldn't own pets / the vet is fucking insane.

One of the first horror stories was a man who brought in his collie because "its butt looks weird". The dog had a massive perineal hernia. For those who want to avoid googling that, it's a type of hernia common in unneutered dogs, where the intestines bulge through a hole in the muscle roughly between the anus and scrotum. The dog was clearly not an indoor dog... it stunk, it's fur was matted, and it was very poorly socialized. For the hernia to get to the size it was, it had probably taken months. The dog couldn't even sit down. The surgery was horrible... it was like my third day working there and I was helping stuff a dogs guts back into its ass.

Anyone who gets a cat declawed deserves to have their fingers chopped off. I flat out refused to help doing declawings after the first one. I didn't care if they fired me, I wasn't having anything to do with it. For those of you who don't know what declawing entails, it's the removal of the cats nail bed. Basically, it's like cutting the first joint of your finger off. The surgery is vile. There were two vets at my clinic (We'll call them Dr L and Dr C for anatomies sake. Dr L owned the clinic, and is the most batshit insane woman I have ever met, but there will be more about that soon. Dr L was cool as hell, and we still talk 10 years after I worked there). Dr C would use the laser method, which is basically using a cauterizing tool to extract the claw bed from the bone.. Ultimately, that's less traumatic to the cat and they heal more quickly.He also ALWAYS advised people wanting to declaw their cat against it. He pushed a product called soft paws, which are little silicoln caps you glue on over the cats nails. They don't cause them any pain, and getting them on is no more difficult than clipping their nails (Plus they come in a range of colors, including glittery ones!) But the first and only declawing I did was with Dr L. She uses something called the "guillotine method" You can imagine how this is done. They use what are basically U shaped scissors and cut the finger off. This can fragment the bone or deform the paw, leading to a life of chronic pain for the cat. I am not a weak stomached person, but I was almost physically ill watching her lob the cats toes off. And as if this cat hadn't suffered enough, it's owner didn't even follow the after care instructions we gave her. She basically took the cat home, took off the bandages, and went about business as normal. She didn't even give the cat its antibiotics because it was 'hard to make her take them'. The cat ended up with infected feet, and had to spend a week with us trying to recover from everything.

Dr C had a lot of very devoted clients. The only reason the clinic could probably even stay open was because of him. We had SO many clients that made it a point that they would only see Dr C, that Dr L was not to touch their animals. Unfortunately, one of Dr Cs biggest fans was a mentally ill cat lady. I don't know how many cats she had exactly, but she came in a few times a month with multiple cats each time. The problem was they kept breeding. And breeding. And inbreeding. And inbreeding some more. Dr C managed to finally start altering them when he got a local pet rescue to agree to help fund it. One of the saddest things I ever saw was when we went to spay what was a very young cat, probably about two years old. She was kind of messed up... her face looked weird and she had something fucky going on with her spine and how she walked. But we got her open, and found out she was pregnant already. One of the kittens had anencephaly (For you non-googlers out there, it's a severe deformation of the skull and brain. Basically, the stop of the skull never forms, and the kittens frontal and central brain never formed. Pretty much, they only have a brain stem which is the part of the brain that controls things like your breathing, the most basic things you need to live. Humans born with this only live a few months at the most) and a few of the other kittens were pretty deformed. We quietly euthanized all of the kittens and didn't tell the woman about it. Over the two years I worked there, we actually got most of her cats altered. She would bring them in in batches, and after every batch we'd get a thank you card in the mail. I felt terrible for the cats, but I felt really bad for her. She had the best intentions and clearly loved her cats, she just wasn't mentally capable enough to know what they needed and what was best for them.

The last story for tonight was the first time I ever raised my voice with a client (I am very soft spoken and polite to a fault; I get anxious instead of angry). He brought in his ancient lab to be euthanized. I took euthanizations very seriously. I'm kind of bad at emotions and stuff, but I've had pets put to sleep, and it's heart breaking. Being as kind and gentle as you can be with the animal and owner is important to me. So I came into the room with the sedative and the euthasol (the drug that stops the heart) already in syringes. I started to explain how I would sedate the dog and let him have as long with the dog as he wanted before I did the second injection, and the dog would pass in about a minuet. The guy rolled his eyes and said something along the lines of "I don't care. I wanted to dump him in the woods but my wife made me do this". I was aghast. I asked him how the hell he could live with a dog for 10+ years and have no emotional connection with it. He said "it's just a dog". At that point I asked him to get the fuck out and pay at the desk. I spent about twenty minuets petting and cuddling the dog and giving him treats before I euthanised him. There was a good chance that was the most love and attention he'd gotten in years, maybe in his whole life. I'm getting teared up just thinking about it. Mos of what I saw at the clinic was the result of ignorance or just neglect, but that was the only time I felt just total apathy from a pet owner. It still disturbs me to think about him.

 

[Bugaboo]

I think declawing cats just cause people don't want to get scratched or have their furniture clawed up should be an illegal. I know 2 people who have declawed cats and I just don't understand. If you can't take the claws, why get the cat? Like I used to get pinched by hermit crabs (well, just 1 of them was the big offended) all the time and I just deal with it because that's what they do and it comes with the package.

Speaking of cutting of things that shouldn't be cut off, I want to punch people right in the nuts who de-fang their tarantulas. Because of the nature of the spider's digestive system it can only eat liquid so when it catches it's prey it injects venom from it's fangs to liquify the insides and then it drinks them, with the fangs gone the animal physically cannot eat. If you can't accept that if you own tarantulas, sooner or later you will be bitten, perhaps a tarantula is not the right animal for you. Some pet stores do this to the tarantulas they sell and it just boggles the mind.

I also have so, so many stories about extreme hermit crab neglect and abuse, people tend not to care about their welfare because "they're just bugs"
Some of you may know that before THE INCIDENT, I used to rescue hermit crabs and had a large tank they all lived in. Anyway the people I got them from every single time are like "the kids got bored come take them" put in the conditons of my tank, at least one crab was always out and about which is a testimate to the care they were given in my tank since hermies are generally nocturnal. Anyway, crabs need humidity to physcially breathe, in conditons with humdity lower than 70% they aren't as active, under 60% will cause irreversible gill damage and they will actually start to slowly suffocate to death (the proper conditons are 80%) and of course all of these tanks the crabs came in were bone dry with less than an inch of substrate and always pellet food (which is actually toxic to them) so no shit the kids got bored because the crabs were in the corner slowly dying. Also whenever I took in crabs they always gave me "supplies" and it was all useless shit like "hermit crab salt" (the only salt water mix suitable for hermit crabs is marine grade stuff like instant ocean because it successfully recreates the trace minerals needed for their continued health) "hermit crab food" (read: toxic shit) and sponges which only harbor bacteria and smell funny are are usless unless you want to break them into small pieces and feed to the crabs.
Also if you keep a crab in a wire cage on gravel I will come to your house and give you dirty looks from across the street and steal your crab when you're not looking because no sensible human can look at that and say "yes, a living creature would be happy in there"

 

[CrispyBacon]

I don't have any horror stories to share, but I really do hate going into pet stores and seeing their reptiles being improperly cared for, or care sheets with incorrect or downright dangerous information.

If you're going to own a reptile, or any type of pet, do your own research from multiple sources and never just take the pet store at its word.

 

[Bugaboo]

I don't have any horror stories to share, but I really do hate going into pet stores and seeing their reptiles being improperly cared for, or care sheets with incorrect or downright dangerous information.

If you're going to own a reptile, or any type of pet, do your own research from multiple sources and never just take the pet store at its word.

In general asking a pet store for any kind of animal related advice is a bad idea. If I have to ask someone at the store where something is and they're all like "what's it for" and I say hermit crab or tarantula they're gonna try to sell me something wildly inappropriate especially if it's something for a crab like I'm looking for the instant ocean and they're like "oh take this hermit crab salt instead" and I'm like " all your crabs die within .5 of a femtosecond and there's a reason why"
I've only come across 2 stores that actually know what they're talking about and those are the only 2 stores I will give my business to and neither carry hermit crabs because the process to collect them, ship them and then distribute them is barbaric and crabs can't breed in captivity (at least only 3 people have managed to get crabs to mate and raise the babies to the stage where they are fully terrestrial) so the collection of crabs for the pet trade is inhumane and not sustainable

 

[For The Internet]

In general asking a pet store for any kind of animal related advice is a bad idea. If I have to ask someone at the store where something is and they're all like "what's it for" and I say hermit crab or tarantula they're gonna try to sell me something wildly inappropriate especially if it's something for a crab like I'm looking for the instant ocean and they're like "oh take this hermit crab salt instead" and I'm like " all your crabs die within .5 of a femtosecond and there's a reason why"
I've only come across 2 stores that actually know what they're talking about and those are the only 2 stores I will give my business to and neither carry hermit crabs because the process to collect them, ship them and then distribute them is barbaric and crabs can't breed in captivity (at least only 3 people have managed to get crabs to mate and raise the babies to the stage where they are fully terrestrial) so the collection of crabs for the pet trade is inhumane and not sustainable

Could you please direct me to some information about that? I've never owned hermit crabs and I never intend to (I have my hands full with 3 cats, 7 birds and sometimes ratties), but I'm always interested in learning more about animal welfare so I can help educate people about pet shops and what those animals go through.

Personally I think it should be illegal for pet stores to carry live animals without thorough regular welfare checks and permits, and I also think anywhere that allows the declawing of cats doesn't deserve to have cats. I don't want to know anyone who would ever consider such a thing, especially vets who are supposed to protect and love animals and know exactly what the process entails and how pointless and cruel it is.

 

[Bugaboo]

Could you please direct me to some information about that? I've never owned hermit crabs and I never intend to (I have my hands full with 3 cats, 7 birds and sometimes ratties), but I'm always interested in learning more about animal welfare so I can help educate people about pet shops and what those animals go through.

Personally I think it should be illegal for pet stores to carry live animals without thorough regular welfare checks and permits, and I also think anywhere that allows the declawing of cats doesn't deserve to have cats. I don't want to know anyone who would ever consider such a thing, especially vets who are supposed to protect and love animals and know exactly what the process entails and how pointless and cruel it is.

The most up to date info on crab care is found on a facebook group called "Hermit Crab Owners" they keep discovering new things to improve the captive lives of crabs and the information has changed a lot even in just the past year. For example some of the things that were discovered recently
-UVB lights were recently deemed essential for the crab's tank
-Discovered crabs enjoy walking on hamster wheels (it has to be a specific model so that the crabs don't get their legs caught in little holes)
-Information was documented on crab limb deformities where they grow like, a leg claw
-Leaf litter (dead leaves from crab safe trees) were deemed an essential part of the hermit crab diet
-We found out crabs have complex eyes and can see more colors than we can (discovered from the brain of an ancient crab fossil which was incredibly similar to today's purple pincher hermit crabs)
In the past the Hermit Crab Association was ths go to source for all things crab but they seem to be stuck in the older ways afraid to try new things, Hermit Crab Owners has the best information out there right now
Edit: I'll ask on the group for like photos and eye witness testaments of hermit crab collection, shipping and distribution they probably have a lot documented, they have a lot of documented "pet store horror" photos, shit like moldy dead crabs, rainbow gravel and crabs clinging to the sides of wire cages. I'll pm you the stuff I find

 

[For The Internet]

The most up to date info on crab care is found on a facebook group called "Hermit Crab Owners" they keep discovering new things to improve the captive lives of crabs and the information has changed a lot even in just the past year. For example some of the things that were discovered recently
-UVB lights were recently deemed essential for the crab's tank
-Discovered crabs enjoy walking on hamster wheels (it has to be a specific model so that the crabs don't get their legs caught in little holes)
-Information was documented on crab limb deformities where they grow like, a leg claw
-Leaf litter (dead leaves from crab safe trees) were deemed an essential part of the hermit crab diet
-We found out crabs have complex eyes and can see more colors than we can (discovered from the brain of an ancient crab fossil which was incredibly similar to today's purple pincher hermit crabs)
In the past the Hermit Crab Association was ths go to source for all things crab but they seem to be stuck in the older ways afraid to try new things, Hermit Crab Owners has the best information out there right now
Edit: I'll ask on the group for like photos and eye witness testaments of hermit crab collection, shipping and distribution they probably have a lot documented, they have a lot of documented "pet store horror" photos, shit like moldy dead crabs, rainbow gravel and crabs clinging to the sides of wire cages. I'll pm you the stuff I find

Thanks for that, I'm particularly interested in the conditions you mentioned for transportation and where they come from. It makes me very sad that people act as if Hermit Crabs can't feel suffering or enjoyment.

I used to work in a nature education centre a few years back. It had a ton of reptiles including a sizeable goanna, as well as small mammals like rats and mice (bred as feeders), dunnarts and hopping mice (native Australian rodents), sugar gliders and even a little bilby (an endagered Australian marsupial). It also had fish, axolotls and some insects like stick insects and native spiders.

The conditions in this place were deplorable. All of the cages/tanks were far too small. The ones up front where the classes of kids came were in much better condition than the ones out back where only employees went, but were still pretty bad. The hopping mice were really overcrowded, the fish and axolotl tanks were always covered in algae and the insect cages were tiny. The bilby was supposedly the big draw since they're rare to see in captivity but it never once left its little house the entire time I worked there. It was kind of a running joke that we weren't even sure there really was a bilby there at all.

That was, as I mentioned, up the front in the public area and it was bad enough. It was the employees only section that really turned my stomach, though.

The rodent cages were all massively overcrowded. The animals didn't even have 3 square inches to themselves. They were all constantly mating and inbreeding and it was terrible. The dunnarts were kept in the 'hot room' (a climate controlled room that was always at desert-like temperatures - we also had a cold room) and their diet consisted of literally nothing but canned dog food, which would quickly go rancid in the 100+ degree room. Dunnarts in the wild mostly live on insects and small prey like tiny lizards but they're omnivorous and clearly needed better things to eat than only the cheapest, shittiest canned dog food there was. There were also stick insects kept in the hot room, and while I worked there there was a population explosion and they all escaped when they weren't fed for a while and most of them ended up crawling into the dunnart cages, where they were promptly eaten. I had to spend two whole days rounding up stray stick insects.

The rats and mice were kept in extremely crowded, dirty cages. They constantly bred. Often the new babies would be killed so they could be fed to smaller reptiles. The rats usually got to live to adulthood before they were culled to be fed to the snakes. Rats are my favourite animals and I accept that it's natural for them to be fed to reptiles, but what bothered me wasn't that they were bred as food, but that they had to live in such appalling conditions and the way they killed them. Baby mice would simply be hurled to the floor, where the impact usually caused a fairly swift death. Adult mice would be held by the tail and whacked hard against the edge of a table. The ones that didn't die on impact had their necks broken with knives. The rats were the worst of all, because rats are such intelligent, sensitive animals. They'd grab them by the tail and whack them against the pavement outside. I have no idea how many survived and had to be hit a second time because I couldn't witness my favourite animals being killed in such a barbaric way. I often supervised the mouse deaths so I could point out survivors and make sure their suffering was ended as the employees doing the job usually failed to notice.

I got so desperate at one point that I started smuggling baby rats home in my handbag so at least some of them could lead happy, long lives where they were loved and well cared for.

The reptiles themselves didn't receive much better treatment. Their enclosures were too small, but the main issue was the constant epic plague of mites. The entire time I worked there the poor reptiles were crawling with mites. They got in everywhere; under their scales, in their eyelids, in their ears. It was usually my job to pick off the mites and give each reptile a mite bath and coat them in anti-mite powder. There were dozens of reptiles so it was a very laborious task. They were never all de-mited at once so they caught them back almost as soon as I was done removing them. I even had to give the very large and pissy goanna mite baths. He was easier to treat in some ways because he didn't have scales they could burrow under, but trying to remove mites from the corners of an enraged goanna's mouth resulted in dozens of bites. He'd also literally shit all over me the whole time and foul up the water so I'd have to change it and start again.

The outdoor cages with the sugar gliders, rabbits and guinea pigs were every bit as bad. They were foul. There was literally no place on the ground or bedding that wasn't covered in shit. In fact, the rabbits had taken to sleeping in their litter trays and avoiding the rest of the enclosure. The sugar glider enclosures were especially vile because of all the fruit that was rotting and mouldering on the ground.

I ended up having to quit because it was making me extremely depressed and emotional working there. No matter how hard I tried I was too low on the totem pole to make any changes. There were way too many animals for me to be able to single-handedly keep them clean and nobody there seemed to give any fucks about the conditions or improving them.

There was only ever one animal there that I ever saw treated well, and that was a massive sulphur-crested cockatoo who belonged to my boss. She adored that bird and brought him to work every day. HE wasn't crammed into a tiny cage with no stimulation and the cheapest food there was. He was allowed free range and stayed on a perch in the open. Everyone had to walk past him to get up the steps to the office and he was an absolutely foul-tempered bird. Every single time anyone walked by him he would launch at them and try to bite them, and my boss found that hilarious. Cockatoos are very intelligent and he was very pleased with the reaction his attacks would get from his owner and from the employees so it just encouraged things. At the time I was very afraid of large birds so it really freaked me out when he'd launch at me. My boss actually yelled at me one time because I said 'No!' very firmly to the bird when it grabbed my shirt and tore it. To this day, even though I own birds (including a fairly large cockatoo) I can't stand sulphur-crested cockatoos and avoid them.

The worst part is that it was a nature education center. We were supposed to educate kids about Australian wildlife and teach them to love and respect animals and care for them. We were supposed to set an example and all we did was make hundreds of animals live short, horrible lives.


It's actually been kind of therapeutic to type that all out, sorry it's such a novel. I love all animals and it deeply disturbed me to be in a position where I saw such horrific neglect and couldn't do anything about it.

tl;dr: I worked in the most reprehensible hellhole in Australia

 

[Red]

I had a guy come in complaining about how his tank was always dirty despite weekly water changes and he had two oscars and a common pleco in a fucking FOUR GALLON FLUVAL CHI. WHY WHY WHY
And no, he didn't get a bigger tank.

I'd reccomend you amend your first post though, betas can't live in bowls period, water changes or not. They need at least 5.5 gallons, but 10 is much better. They're from slow-flowing water bodies and daily water changes is extremely stressful for them. On top of that bowls can't be consistently heated to the 79 degrees they need. No fish should be in anything but a fully cycled tank period.

More people need to learn the nitrogen cycle. Ugh.

Fish keeping in general drives me crazy. Cichlids are known to show complex social behaviors and some species learn new things on the same level as APES. Yet people are willing to get them as decorations and neglect them. A best friend of mine is a cichlid keeper who literally devotes her life to her fish. She spends months creating a tank that is the correct size and uses decor that matches their natural environment as best as she can. She literally has hundreds of gallons of tanks between her home and her cousin's where she keeps the larger tanks. So many cichlid keepers are hellbent on filling their tank with as many fish as possible, but she rarely ever has more than 2 species of fish per tank, and even then they're always ones that naturally live together. If you want some good fishkeeping, check her out.

ETA: I fucking hate when people feed discus beef heart. Like really? Fucking really? You're going to feed an animal whose diet is almost entirely plant matter in the wild a carnivorous diet, and on top of that, something from a mammal? Which most fish don't have the correct metabolism to digest? Dear God.
Who looks at a fucking living peacock dinner plate and thinks "yeah, that body is designed for leaping out of the water and burrowing into the flesh of ungulate mammals"

 

[MW 002]

People who own horses can be some of the most arrogant, stuck up pricks one can encounter. If you have horses yourself, they can view you as competition and become even more arrogant. We had one woman call mom and tell her it was a PRIVILEGE for us to hire the farrier on the day he was supposed to be working on HER horses (It was a short appointment, and the farrier had lots of time before having to go to the woman).

One of the biggest mistakes horse owners can do is buy alfalfa hay. Cattle (especially dairy cattle) need lots of nutrients in their feed because of their odd digestive cycle, and so Alfalfa hay is considered superior over grass hay (It doesnt help that alfalfa hay is almost double the price of grass hay, and some owners have that "Special Snowflake" mentality about their horse). Alfalfa is a legume, meaning it is full of nitrates, and horses are extremely sensitive to nitrogen. So a lot of horse owners buy Alfalfa hay , feed nothing but alfalfa to them, then wonder why the poor horse gets laminitus (founder) and is crippled for life.

You just highlighted the very reason I don't work in the horse industry anymore. The farm owner was fucking nuts, she would insist on having a "one shoe size fits all" feeding system on her horses... Then wondered why her one show horse was getting obese. To be honest, that horse didn't even need grain he just needed more turn out so he can exercise more- but she assumed lunging once a day and a few hours of turn out was good enough. I was there for about a year.

There also was sheep there too. To make a long story short, she bought an emaciated herd of them from an auction and placed them with the healthier sheep a month later- then five months later, most sheep in that hers were starting to get sick. Early on I kept informing her of the ewes and lambs getting diarrhea and losing weight... All that ended up happening was increasing the grain- which didn't help because it kept getting worse.

When it came to lambs dying from this illness, instead of sending carcasses in for post mortem exams (to check for diseases) she just blamed the staff for not"paying enough attention".

At the same time with her, anytime horses got loose it was the fault of the staff. If horses got hurt, it was the fault of the staff. If anything went wrong, it was the staff's fault.

I then got sick of the blame game and promptly quit.

 

[toulouse]

I had a couple come in yesterday wanting to purchase a pair of goldfish but they were utterly clueless about them, especially their space requirement. I did what I could to explain basic care, but everything I said was met with blank stares and "hmm"ing. The boyfriend brought me a 2.5 gallon tank and asked if that was enough for a pair of goldfish, and then looked deeply confused when I mentioned goldfish need a lot more room than that, and a filter. We have a dollar per gallon sale going on right now, so I tried to convince him to get a bigger tank because most of them wound up being cheaper than the 2.5, but he got all up in arms and was like "I'll buy the smaller tank somewhere for cheaper!" and he and his girlfriend took the goldfish and left.

They did not find somewhere cheaper, because they came back an hour later because they wanted to return the fish.

Sometime last week, in the wee hours of the morning, someone left a cardboard box with two bunnies outside our door for the opening manager to find. They were crazy hungry and the male had nails so long they sort of curled under his paws and he hopped a little funny because of it. We don't sell rabbits, so we ended up having to adopt them out, but they did get a pretty decent ending-- a regular customer came in and completely fell in love with them, and ended up taking both.

We sell like these little games for dog-- there's a bunch of different ones, but the gist of it is you put kibble or treats in a chamber, and the dog has to sniff it out and flip a lid or press a button or something like that. I had a lady bring up one that worked like a slot machine, and she asked me if this would be good as a feeder for when she was out of town. I told her about the automatic feeders we already sell, and apparently those were too expensive for her.

 

[Bugaboo]

I had a guy come in complaining about how his tank was always dirty despite weekly water changes and he had two oscars and a common pleco in a fucking FOUR GALLON FLUVAL CHI. WHY WHY WHY
And no, he didn't get a bigger tank.

I'd reccomend you amend your first post though, betas can't live in bowls period, water changes or not. They need at least 5.5 gallons, but 10 is much better. They're from slow-flowing water bodies and daily water changes is extremely stressful for them. On top of that bowls can't be consistently heated to the 79 degrees they need. No fish should be in anything but a fully cycled tank period.

More people need to learn the nitrogen cycle. Ugh.

Fish keeping in general drives me crazy. Cichlids are known to show complex social behaviors and some species learn new things on the same level as APES. Yet people are willing to get them as decorations and neglect them. A best friend of mine is a cichlid keeper who literally devotes her life to her fish. She spends months creating a tank that is the correct size and uses decor that matches their natural environment as best as she can. She literally has hundreds of gallons of tanks between her home and her cousin's where she keeps the larger tanks. So many cichlid keepers are hellbent on filling their tank with as many fish as possible, but she rarely ever has more than 2 species of fish per tank, and even then they're always ones that naturally live together. If you want some good fishkeeping, check her out.

ETA: I fucking hate when people feed discus beef heart. Like really? Fucking really? You're going to feed an animal whose diet is almost entirely plant matter in the wild a carnivorous diet, and on top of that, something from a mammal? Which most fish don't have the correct metabolism to digest? Dear God.
Who looks at a fucking living peacock dinner plate and thinks "yeah, that body is designed for leaping out of the water and burrowing into the flesh of ungulate mammals"

I don't agree with keeping bettas in bowls but some people I know have done it successfully and have had healthy, long lived bettas (8 years plus) and the whole aquarium society is like "yeah that's fine" so little old me has no place to argue.
Of course these are the same people who have like, 12+ bettas so maybe they need to tone it down a lil'
Personally I have a 10 gallon and some equipment set aside for a betta

Also, one of the stores I go to keep live mice and rats to sell as feeders and to feed to their own animals. I went there one day and the guy was about to feed a big ol' lizard so he grabs a mouse, I turn away for one second and turn back and bam the mouse is dead as shit. He had quickly severed it's spine or snapped it's neck or something (he had said he snapped it's neck quickly) within like a split second and I think if you really must feed a fresh rodent to an animal (either because they're picky or you're trying to get them on frozen) that's probably the best way to do it because
-the mouse feels nothing
-the animal eating is in no danger of being bitten or scratched

Also people who feed live mice to tarantulas are batshit insane. Animals like crickets don't have the capacity to feel pain the way a mouse does and when the tarantula bites that mouse, it's guts are liquified and it dies slowly and it may bite the tarantula and if it gets bitten in a well placed way then you're gonna have 1 less tarantula

 

[Coldgrip]

From the Retail thread:

I don't remember if I had said this but when I was working at a pet store fucking people kept coming in and asking how to care for baby red eared sliders they found crossing the road. Mother fucker you put that shit back because
-It's illegal to take a wild animal from the wild and keep it in captivity without a lisence in Ontario and to get a lisence you need to be a vet of some sort doing wildlife rehab
-The turtles weren't injured, they were just a babies crossing the road, just pick them up, put them at the other side and drive away
-Red eared sliders get fucking massive, males are smallest and they need at least a 75 gallon tank

Shouldn't the turtle of been surrendered to the Humane Society instead? Red Eared Sliders are considered an invasive species north of Mexico.

 

[Rabbit Bones]

I used to be big into snakes... I had about 20 at the height of things. And yeah... I killed the mice and rats before I fed them. I felt bad about it (the rats in paticular, because I've had rats as pets and know what smart, wonderful little animals they are) but the only time I live fed was horrifying. It takes so long for the mouse to be killed, and they suffer so much. Me just... dispatching the rodent before just seemed like the more humane thing to do, and I didn't have to worry about my snakes being bitten. I considered buying frozen ones, but there's no guarantee that they were kept in better conditions or killed any more painlessly than I could do on my own.

I've heard about some people putting the mice in the freezer in tupperware until they die of hypothermia. Those people are monsters. It would be more humane to just toss it alive to the snake.

 

[Overcast]

I used to remember this pet shop several years back that my family and I would visit that had a bunch of puppies. I used to love playing with them a little. Later on we found out the place got closed down because the puppies in there were sick and not properly cared for.

Anyway, my grandmother is pretty much your stereotypical cat lady. She had dozens of cats over the course of her life, and she's always willing to find more from the streets and care for them. At that point, she would either send them to an animal shelter or keep them for herself. Usually the latter. At the very least, she fixes her cats and keeps the males and females separate. But I've been to her house several times before and the house always stunk of cats and had dandruff and dust everywhere. It was kinda hard to breathe in there.

One day, we went inside one of the cat rooms and I found that she had this one feral cat and essentially trapped it in this tiny makeshift tunnel using the furniture and some blankets. And the only place the cat can go is into the closet. It spends pretty much its entire life in there with nowhere else to go. The same kinda goes with the rest of her cats. As stated previously, the males and females are separated into different rooms and aren't really allowed to go anywhere else in the house. They don't even really get to go outside either. The closest thing to that is this tunnel that connected to the house that leads to a shed in the backyard which has windows.

She also likes to leave food out in front of her house so stray cats and other animals get to eat on her front porch. The neighbors complained about this as that can lead to vermin invading.

I really don't understand what goes through her mind to be honest. She's not a bad person, but her obsession with cats has taken over her life. It's gotten to the point where my dad, her son, can't really stand to be around her anymore because she almost always talks about cats.

 

[Bugaboo]

From the Retail thread:

Shouldn't the turtle of been surrendered to the Humane Society instead? Red Eared Sliders are considered an invasive species north of Mexico.

I wasn't aware of that honestly, so I should have told them to take it to the local reptile rescue because they take in and adopt out red eared sliders all the time

 

[Overcast]

Thanks for that, I'm particularly interested in the conditions you mentioned for transportation and where they come from. It makes me very sad that people act as if Hermit Crabs can't feel suffering or enjoyment.

I used to work in a nature education centre a few years back. It had a ton of reptiles including a sizeable goanna, as well as small mammals like rats and mice (bred as feeders), dunnarts and hopping mice (native Australian rodents), sugar gliders and even a little bilby (an endagered Australian marsupial). It also had fish, axolotls and some insects like stick insects and native spiders.

The conditions in this place were deplorable. All of the cages/tanks were far too small. The ones up front where the classes of kids came were in much better condition than the ones out back where only employees went, but were still pretty bad. The hopping mice were really overcrowded, the fish and axolotl tanks were always covered in algae and the insect cages were tiny. The bilby was supposedly the big draw since they're rare to see in captivity but it never once left its little house the entire time I worked there. It was kind of a running joke that we weren't even sure there really was a bilby there at all.

That was, as I mentioned, up the front in the public area and it was bad enough. It was the employees only section that really turned my stomach, though.

The rodent cages were all massively overcrowded. The animals didn't even have 3 square inches to themselves. They were all constantly mating and inbreeding and it was terrible. The dunnarts were kept in the 'hot room' (a climate controlled room that was always at desert-like temperatures - we also had a cold room) and their diet consisted of literally nothing but canned dog food, which would quickly go rancid in the 100+ degree room. Dunnarts in the wild mostly live on insects and small prey like tiny lizards but they're omnivorous and clearly needed better things to eat than only the cheapest, shittiest canned dog food there was. There were also stick insects kept in the hot room, and while I worked there there was a population explosion and they all escaped when they weren't fed for a while and most of them ended up crawling into the dunnart cages, where they were promptly eaten. I had to spend two whole days rounding up stray stick insects.

The rats and mice were kept in extremely crowded, dirty cages. They constantly bred. Often the new babies would be killed so they could be fed to smaller reptiles. The rats usually got to live to adulthood before they were culled to be fed to the snakes. Rats are my favourite animals and I accept that it's natural for them to be fed to reptiles, but what bothered me wasn't that they were bred as food, but that they had to live in such appalling conditions and the way they killed them. Baby mice would simply be hurled to the floor, where the impact usually caused a fairly swift death. Adult mice would be held by the tail and whacked hard against the edge of a table. The ones that didn't die on impact had their necks broken with knives. The rats were the worst of all, because rats are such intelligent, sensitive animals. They'd grab them by the tail and whack them against the pavement outside. I have no idea how many survived and had to be hit a second time because I couldn't witness my favourite animals being killed in such a barbaric way. I often supervised the mouse deaths so I could point out survivors and make sure their suffering was ended as the employees doing the job usually failed to notice.

I got so desperate at one point that I started smuggling baby rats home in my handbag so at least some of them could lead happy, long lives where they were loved and well cared for.

The reptiles themselves didn't receive much better treatment. Their enclosures were too small, but the main issue was the constant epic plague of mites. The entire time I worked there the poor reptiles were crawling with mites. They got in everywhere; under their scales, in their eyelids, in their ears. It was usually my job to pick off the mites and give each reptile a mite bath and coat them in anti-mite powder. There were dozens of reptiles so it was a very laborious task. They were never all de-mited at once so they caught them back almost as soon as I was done removing them. I even had to give the very large and pissy goanna mite baths. He was easier to treat in some ways because he didn't have scales they could burrow under, but trying to remove mites from the corners of an enraged goanna's mouth resulted in dozens of bites. He'd also literally shit all over me the whole time and foul up the water so I'd have to change it and start again.

The outdoor cages with the sugar gliders, rabbits and guinea pigs were every bit as bad. They were foul. There was literally no place on the ground or bedding that wasn't covered in shit. In fact, the rabbits had taken to sleeping in their litter trays and avoiding the rest of the enclosure. The sugar glider enclosures were especially vile because of all the fruit that was rotting and mouldering on the ground.

I ended up having to quit because it was making me extremely depressed and emotional working there. No matter how hard I tried I was too low on the totem pole to make any changes. There were way too many animals for me to be able to single-handedly keep them clean and nobody there seemed to give any fucks about the conditions or improving them.

There was only ever one animal there that I ever saw treated well, and that was a massive sulphur-crested cockatoo who belonged to my boss. She adored that bird and brought him to work every day. HE wasn't crammed into a tiny cage with no stimulation and the cheapest food there was. He was allowed free range and stayed on a perch in the open. Everyone had to walk past him to get up the steps to the office and he was an absolutely foul-tempered bird. Every single time anyone walked by him he would launch at them and try to bite them, and my boss found that hilarious. Cockatoos are very intelligent and he was very pleased with the reaction his attacks would get from his owner and from the employees so it just encouraged things. At the time I was very afraid of large birds so it really freaked me out when he'd launch at me. My boss actually yelled at me one time because I said 'No!' very firmly to the bird when it grabbed my shirt and tore it. To this day, even though I own birds (including a fairly large cockatoo) I can't stand sulphur-crested cockatoos and avoid them.

The worst part is that it was a nature education center. We were supposed to educate kids about Australian wildlife and teach them to love and respect animals and care for them. We were supposed to set an example and all we did was make hundreds of animals live short, horrible lives.


It's actually been kind of therapeutic to type that all out, sorry it's such a novel. I love all animals and it deeply disturbed me to be in a position where I saw such horrific neglect and couldn't do anything about it.

tl;dr: I worked in the most reprehensible hellhole in Australia

Goddamn. I feel for you and those animals. I had to google to see what a goanna looked like and yikes! That thing looks like it can bite pretty hard.

 

[Trapped_Fairy]

These are some stories from back when I was just starting horseback riding at a rather large riding school, by large I mean the instructor, a kindly, but tough old woman named Miss Nancy, owned and cared for around 50 ponies and full sized horses with her staff. Her horses were always in brilliant shape and she often took in abused, neglected, or "troublesome" horses and rehabilitated them, even when they seemed hopeless to everyone else.

The first one is about Raphial, a beautiful black stallion, who was kept penned up by himself far from the other horses. On my first day there, I couldn't help but ask about him as one of the girls mentioned that no one was allowed to ride him except Miss Nancy. I was told it was simply because he was very temperamental and wouldn't let anyone else near him, horse or person, let alone ride him. I left it at that for then, but later decided to ask Miss Nancy myself, wanting to know the full story behind him. It turns out that before his rescue, he was severely neglected, I mean, barely ever fed,unloved, and barely alive. He had major trust issues, understandably, and had a tendency to act out against anything near him. To this day, Miss Nancy is the only person he will let care for him at all.

Now, for story two. I was taking the beginner horse, a chestnut colored mare named Ginger, out of the stables and getting her prepped for riding, when she just decided to relieve herself while I was putting on her saddle. I lightheartedly scolded her, since she barely missed my shoes, and my instructor scolded me, telling me not to say that. It turned out that Ginger's abuse had been that her old owners would beat her whenever she dared use the restroom. She was so terrified that she would literally hold it until she was stabled every night and then absolutely wreck her stall with waste. I immediately apologized both to Miss Nancy and Ginger after learning this. Ginger is one of the sweetest horses at the stables, patient and loving. I was just flabberghasted that anyone would hurt that gentle soul. She always tries and veers towards another horse at the stables, Jennifer, who is her fully grown baby, just so they can see each other a little more. She has such a big heart despite what she's been through.

 

[Ido]

A few years ago my mom was a dating this guy, his three children were in their mid-twenties to early-thirties and they were all living with him, they didn't pay rent, nor did they do anything for themselves. I only really met one of them, his daughter who I'll call Bitch. Now Bitch had a Bearded Dragon so she brought him to my house one time because I have one too. Bitch brought her's in a cricket container, it was pretty big, and it's legs were blue because she used calcium sand. My beardie attacked the poor thing when I brought my laptop out (he thinks it's his) and so she put him back in the catcher before leaving an hour or so later. There house was awful, it needed to be put on hoarders or something, my god, but I went to see the poor guy and he was in the basment, a place they barely went, his cage was filthy, the only thing he had to stimulate himself with was the TV and those bastards put it on a timer so they didn't have to go down there). It came out that the daughter wasn't feeding her beardie anything but those pellets you soak in water for about half a day (usually the crickets eat them, not the beardies) and she'd leave it in for 1-3 days at a time because she had school. Both my mom and I yelled at her and begged for her to give him to us, even if ours fought with him he'd be living a much better life than he was with her, but she fucking refused and got more animals she couldn't take care of. Her dad admitted to feeling bad, said he caught a grasshopper outside and gave it to him (that pissed me off because it could have be diseased) We lost contact after bitch slapped my mom in the face, in a restaurant, in front of someone I've known and went to school with all of my life. I doubt the poor thing is alive today, I desperately want to know whats become of the poor thing, I've thought of opening contact with bitch, if only to find out, but she fucking slapped my mom and I want nothing to do with her.


Oh god I still feel really bad about this one. One of my relatives wanted a beardie for her kids (she has four) because she loved mine. Her family is shit with animals though, they keep their dogs in the laundry room (and wonder why one of them has an attitude problems), while their cats get free roam. She got the first one for her second child and two days later her 3rd child wanted her own, so they went out and got another one a week later. I was over, but one of the cages was partially off the desk, I remember asking the kids if they could put it elsewhere, or take the shelves off of the desk it was on (because that was a thing that could happen), I was told no, their mom refused to take the shelf thing off. Okay, whatever. I believe it was the next day we get a call that the cat had jumped on the shelves and knocked 100 crickets on the floor, oh how my mom and I laughed... until not even 10 minutes later we got a frantic call from the kids, the cat had also jumped on top of the cage, the thing shattered, the new beardie they had gotten the day had been hit with the black bar thing that surrounds the top of the cage directly across his back, it wasn't doing well. Their parents were at work, so my mom and I rushed over to do what we could. The poor thing wasn't doing well. not at all, couldn't move his back legs, I helped clean up the room where the crickets escaped, and we all sat around and waited for their father (who was on his way home to deal with the crisis), he picked up 3rd child and beardie and went to the pet store. They were gone for some time and when they came back they had a new cage... and a new beardie? Their father said that he used the sick pet warranty to trade the hurt one in for a different one, they didn't even say he got hurt, just that he was sick, I'm getting emotional just thinking about it. The people at the pet store had no idea what was really wrong. when we left their house after everything was under control I broke down, when we got home I had my mom call up to the pet store to check up on him, the vet was going to be coming in a few days from then, I remember mom calling the next day and someone had said they had put him in water and he seemed to perk up a bit, but the day after that I believe he passed away. That little thing could have gotten the help it DESERVED if they had told the truth, or it could have been put out of its misery, but no, just say it's sick and get a replacement. They gave them away recently, we haven't been close so I didn't really know, they hardly got their cages cleaned or were taken out, the little guys probably better off.

There is no such thing as a throwaway put and I will fight anyone who thinks otherwise.