Corporate America and Reptiles, Image not for the faint of heart.

ebuch

New Member
Messages
93
Location
SC
I've been doing the whole reptile thing for around 4 years now. There is a local corporate pet store chain in town that sells Leopard Geckos, AFTs, Crested Geckos, etc, that I have always bought my supplies from. I buy from here, and not from the local pet store because I've gone in there and the Leos that they've had always appear to be overweight, and overcrowded, 3 or more stuffed into a habitat with the surface area of around a 10 gallon. I went to the reptile section and what I find is 1 juvenile leopard gecko with an infection of its mouth that appears to have spread up into its eye, which is propping itself against the glass. Inside the cage were 7 or 8 giant crickets that had pretty much taken over the habitat that looked too big for him to eat anyway. The guy who works aquatics knows me and asked me if I needed crickets because I was spending more time with the reptiles than usual. I couldn't find anything wrong in the enclosures other than the one Leo so I bought the crickets I needed and headed off.

Here's the problem that I face now that I sit back and think about it. This past weekend that pet store had a sale on all of their reptiles and leopard geckos were 50% off. This place is NEVER sold out of leopard geckos, and as early as last week their were a whole colony of them living in there. So now I see this and realize that a combination of the following options must be true:

A) They don't know how to tell if a reptile is sick and that's why they continued to feed it instead of taking it off the floor and bringing it to the vet.
B) They don't care that the reptile is even alive in there and that's why they didn't check that it was sick.
C) They sold five leopard geckos over the weekend that may very well have the same exact infection and they don't know
D) They sold five leopard geckos over the weekend that may very well have the same exact infection and they don't care

Either way, after talking to the aquatics specialist about the sick gecko he said that the management wouldn't care, and he would tell them because he has reptiles and he takes it personally when they let animals die on the floor like that. And I realized that B and D are most likely correct and that this has been happening the entire time the store has been opened and normally there are just too many reptiles in there for me to notice.

So where do you draw the line ethically? Do you boycott the big business or do you just assume that its a misstep and that the aquatics specialist is being dramatic? Do I just start ordering all my supplies from online vendors? Or am I being too dramatic? Is it worth it to try and educate the locally owned pet store or is fat and overcrowded not so bad at the end of the day?

Is the best answer to accept that there is nothing we can do and just not support vendors we know don't take care of their reptiles?

It's certainly better than this <see below>:
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