Don't buy pets from 'Big Name' pet stores!

 I am a pet lover, and I own many pets myself.  I frequent many pet stores, and over the years and found some pretty horrible things!

I once entered PetL**d.  In this store, I visited the reptile section.  To my suprise... well honestly I wasn't very suprised... I found THREE dead lizards in the display cages.  One of them was dried out to the point it must have been sitting there dead and decaying for DAYS...  This means the store hadn't fed or checked up on the reptiles for DAYS.  I of course talked to a manager, and let them know they have many dead reptiles in their cages, and that they have lost a customer for life.  I was nice to them, I didn't yell at them or anything - causing a scene and acting like an asshole won't do anything but make yourself look bad.  So I calmy stated the problem and said 'goodbye' to the store.

Aside from dead animals, most large pet stores give horribly wrong information about care and feeding!  I once purchased some brackish fish from a very nice 'large chain fish store'.  Well, I was told they were brackish fish.  When they started dieing, I realized something must be wrong.  I researched and found more than half of the fish were FRESHwater fish, NOT brackish fish...  These were fish I hadn't heard of before(the store does have a LARGE variety of cool fish).  This time when I went back to the store, I again asked to talk to a manager, I politely said that I wasn't looking for any type of refund, but that I was given wrong information that caused these animals to die, and that is sad and costly for their customers.  This store wasn't very nice... I was told that I must have mistaken what I heard, and that they wouldn't have given me this wrong information.  They told me I was stupid basically...  Wow... what great managers...  So another store I won't visit anymore.

The point is.  Do your OWN research, and do not trust what pet stores tell you!  Even if they sound like they know what they are talking about, they most likely don't, and they are probably missing some key elements to keeping the pet you ask about.

Always research the animal you want before you get it.  Online is a great place to research, but don't always trust the 'first' source, always read over many different sources of information about the animal you want to own.

Good luck and happy pet keeping!