As I'm sure all of you have heard different horror stories of Petco's and PetSmarts through out the US. I wanted to share my adventures today. This is how it all started.. Last weekend on one of our trips to the petstores to pick up odds and ends you need, we found they had Tegu's on sale.. But what they didn't realize was these were RED TEGU's. They were on sale for $44.99.. So instead of trusting our instinct we came home and looked them up to make sure we knew what they truely were. They were definately RED's.. Not the advertised Black and White that they thought they were.
Yesterday, we decide to go back and pick up one or two. Of course they only had one left when we got there, and we took it to the counter and proceeded to purchase it. One of the guys says, "hold on, I need to ask the manager the SKU number, because these aren't normals there more expensive." So the manager tells the guy, " No its Corporates fault and we are selling them for the price advertised." We smiled, payed the lady and out we went. Feeling rather smug about ourselves at this point.
We came home and started thinking about it. And decided, we wanted to get atleast one more, to hopefully come up with a pair. So that brings us to today.
We made a round trip of 6 different Petco's. And what we saw was just disheartening. In atleast 4 of the 6 stores. There were dead lizards in there cages. Those that were still alive, were barely hanging on. I saw green iguana's that had just bones and skin, no muscles. A rock iguana that was so dehydrated it wouldn't open its eyes, very shallow breathing. Ball Pythons in with the Red tails in one mass pile-o-snakes. There was no heat in a majority of the cages, and those that had some, refused to move for fear they wouldn't get it again.
If I owned a house, I would have taken the whole fricken store home with me. I was so upset. We did end up bring home another 3 red tegu's.. One of the red's we are calling RUNT.. there is barely any meat on his/her little legs.. We are going to see about getting him/her back up to the weight it should be at.
So I'm composing an email to send to Petco Corporation and tell them about the different stores in my area. Which ones couldn't even pass an inspection if there life depended on it. Man I wish someone could do a surprise inspection on these places.
I took a picture of "Runt" so you guys could see the poor thing.. When we picked her up, she wouldn't even open her eyes, we got her home, in her new enviorment..and the first thing they all did.. was drink tell they were full.
[addsig]
