Petco Animal Cruelty

[d_virginiana]

It could have been either; like I said, I know absolutely nothing about leopard geckos.
I just generally figure chain petstore employees know nothing about the animals they carry. There's one fish 'specialist' at my local petsmart that's really good, but generally they're incompetent. I kind of wish they would stick to snakes and lizards; they're kind of hard to kill compared to other reptiles. Talking to other pacman frog owners, I see a LOT of people who get frogs from petstores that come with fatal or near-fatal impaction or metabolic issues from the petstore care.

[ConcinusMan]

It could have been either; like I said, I know absolutely nothing about leopard geckos.
I just generally figure chain petstore employees know nothing about the animals they carry. There's one fish 'specialist' at my local petsmart that's really good, but generally they're incompetent.

If I were to "generalize" as you have stated, I would tend to say that you are correct. Petco employees are not zoologists and they certainly are generally not even intermediate in their knowledge of herpetoculture. They are retail "associates". You really shouldn't expect them to know any more about the animals they sell, than a person selling clothing knows about how and where that clothing was made. You really shouldn't expect them to know very much. A person working at a gas station sells gasoline ("Petrol" for you guys across the pond). I wouldn't expect them to know exactly where it came from, or how it was made. I only expect them to sell it to me if I should desire to have it. If I have questions, and they have real answers, that is just a bonus but it is not a given.

Petco is not a zoo. It's not even a place where animals are bred, produced, or studied. Their business model does not depend on the quality of their knowledge of the animals. They are not experts in herpetoculture and they don't claim to be. It is a retail establishment which happens to have live animals for sale. That's it. We should not expect them to be anything more than that. This business requires animals to be housed there temporarily. We should not expect the housing and conditions to be ideal. We should only expect a reasonable level of care and we should expect that animals are not severely neglected and dying under the care of the retail establishment. Don't get me wrong, I'm no fan of petco as a corporation but they have taken many steps to improve what happens in their stores, and many meaningful actions to make "animals come first".

It's not perfect. We can sit here and nitpick about their husbandry at individual stores, but to me that's like condemning the entire snake hobby because a few people continue to mistreat or neglect their animals. I'd be willing to bet that there are far more private herp keepers out there doing far more heinous things to their animals and the only difference is that we don't see it all like we see it when we walk into petco stores. Private collectors don't have upwards of hundreds of people walking in and seeing the way they keep their herps.

Look, I "hate" petco as much as the next "petco basher" but lets get real. They're not all that bad when you take into consideraton all stores. Many reforms have been made at corporate level to change things. In any huge corporation, there's going to be at least a few incidents where management of individual stores, fails to meet the corporate standards.

I just feel like this latest video about the gecko's is flat out nitpicking. That isn't **** compared to what used to go on in almost all of their stores. I feel like videos like that are just people who heard about all the problems from years past and are now putting extreme scrutiny on the stores anywhere they can find something to pick at.

Seriously... like I said, you can look at almost anyone's collection and husbandry and find something to pick at. But if you saw petco stores in the 1990's like I did, you would be writing to the upper management and praising them for the vast improvements they have made since then.