I just experienced the PETCO experience but I wasn’t at PETCO…. All week long there has been an advertisement in the Pet section of the paper about a new Exotic animal and Reptile store opening at the weekend market. I was excited, thinking that there would be another source for reptiles in my area. My husband and I went out to the weekend market, not knowing what time they opened (hadn’t been there for years). (You got the part about my husband going to look at reptiles,
). We arrived 10 minutes before the market opened but the doors were open so we looked around. We found the reptile booth and began looking around. Important part here, the weekend market takes place in an old dairy barn, cement floors, brick walls and NO HEAT!!! None of the reptiles had any type of heating on when we got there, last night the temperatures dropped into the 40’s. They had geckos (golden, tokay and alligator) in these 12”x18”x 4” containers, the golden were dehydrated (skin wrinkled) and they had crickets all over them. The baby iggy’s were climbing on top of each other up the wall of the enclosure, as there was not place to climb, once again no heating source when we got there. I looked in the cage and there was a small light hanging down into the cage stopping about 1’ from the floor, there was a water dish (plastic oblong container) filled with 4” of water. It just went on and on and on…. There were heat rocks in cages, newts with out a water source for swimming, a tortuous that had all of it appendages pulled in.
After the official opening time, the guy showed up. Bringing with him a 2’ alligator, which he puts in a 10-gallon tank with two painted turtles that were the size of a soup bowl. He had and interesting lizard called a yellow striped dragon, I had never heard of this type (what I don’t know much any how). I started asking him questions about the dragon, like where it came from, what it ate, etc. He had no idea anything about these lizards; his replay is I can’t find anything about them. SO WHY ARE YOU SELLING THEM!! At this point I walked away. Now what should I do? Call the humane society or the dog control (neither work weekends).
And then thire was a blue tonge skink that had mouth rot so bad that it could not even close it's mouth
So yes you should call the SPCA and tell the what you saw. I did and when they came in the store the manager thought they was going to by a reptile
funny yes So they said that they was hear to see the reptiles. And so he had to let them. And they saw that and they was out of a store. I was so happy
