# Pet Store and Pet Ownership Horrors



## Bugaboo (Sep 28, 2015)

We were clogging up the retail horror thread with stories of stupid idiots who shouldn't even be in charge of a pet rock and people who have no business selling animals so I made this thread. Some story highlights from me include:
-People taking healthy wild animals in and asking me what to feed them (this is illegal in my province btw)
-Boy asking me what to feed a baby snapping turtle (!!!)
-Hillbilly tarantula neglect
-Baby iguanas being sold in pet shops
-Puppy mills
-Puppies being sold at garage sales
-Broken toe pet shop lizard
-Telling a family that a common pleco was going to stay small (spoiler: they don't)
-Extreme hermit crab abuse, neglect and misinformation
-Water ammonia levels of 8.8, still confused why fish are dying
-80% water change. Why did my neon tetras drop dead shortly after?
-"WHAT CAN I KEEP IN MY FISH BOWL" (spoiler: nothing unless you want a betta and to have to change the water every single day) (spoiler: they never change the water)


----------



## Goofy Logic (Sep 28, 2015)

People who own horses can be some of the most arrogant, stuck up pricks one can encounter.  If you have horses yourself, they can view you as competition and become even more arrogant.  We had one woman call mom and tell her it was a PRIVILEGE for us to hire the farrier on the day he was supposed to be working on HER horses (It was a short appointment, and the farrier had lots of time before having to go to the woman).

One of the biggest mistakes horse owners can do is buy alfalfa hay.  Cattle (especially dairy cattle) need lots of nutrients in their feed because of their odd digestive cycle, and so Alfalfa hay is considered superior over grass hay (It doesnt help that alfalfa hay is almost double the price of grass hay, and some owners have that "Special Snowflake" mentality about their horse).  Alfalfa is a legume, meaning it is full of nitrates, and horses are extremely sensitive to nitrogen.  So a lot of horse owners buy Alfalfa hay , feed nothing but alfalfa to them, then wonder why the poor horse gets laminitus (founder) and is crippled for life.


----------



## Rabbit Bones (Sep 28, 2015)

I have so much fodder for this thread. I'm going to start with a warning though. I worked at the most back water vet clinic in town, for the most insane woman I've ever met. Most of my stories are probably going to be a combination of people who shouldn't own pets / the vet is fucking insane. 

One of the first horror stories was a man who brought in his collie because "its butt looks weird". The dog had a _massive_ perineal hernia. For those who want to avoid googling that, it's a type of hernia common in unneutered dogs, where the intestines bulge through a hole in the muscle roughly between the anus and scrotum. The dog was clearly not an indoor dog... it stunk, it's fur was matted, and it was very poorly socialized. For the hernia to get to the size it was, it had probably taken months. The dog couldn't even sit down. The surgery was horrible... it was like my third day working there and I was helping stuff a dogs guts back into its ass. 

Anyone who gets a cat declawed deserves to have their fingers chopped off. I flat out refused to help doing declawings after the first one. I didn't care if they fired me, I wasn't having anything to do with it. For those of you who don't know what declawing entails, it's the removal of the cats nail bed. Basically, it's like cutting the first joint of your finger off. The surgery is vile. There were two vets at my clinic (We'll call them Dr L and Dr C for anatomies sake. Dr L owned the clinic, and is the most batshit insane woman I have ever met, but there will be more about that soon. Dr L was cool as hell, and we still talk 10 years after I worked there). Dr C would use the laser method, which is basically using a cauterizing tool to extract the claw bed from the bone.. Ultimately, that's less traumatic to the cat and they heal more quickly.He also ALWAYS advised people wanting to declaw their cat against it. He pushed a product called soft paws, which are little silicoln caps you glue on over the cats nails. They don't cause them any pain, and getting them on is no more difficult than clipping their nails (Plus they come in a range of colors, including glittery ones!) But the first and only declawing I did was with Dr L. She uses something called the "guillotine method" You can imagine how this is done. They use what are basically U shaped scissors and cut the finger off. This can fragment the bone or deform the paw, leading to a life of chronic pain for the cat. I am not a weak stomached person, but I was almost physically ill watching her lob the cats toes off.  And as if this cat hadn't suffered enough, it's owner didn't even follow the after care instructions we gave her. She basically took the cat home, took off the bandages, and went about business as normal. She didn't even give the cat its antibiotics because it was 'hard to make her take them'. The cat ended up with infected feet, and had to spend a week with us trying to recover from everything. 

Dr C had a lot of very devoted clients. The only reason the clinic could probably even stay open was because of him. We had SO many clients that made it a point that they would only see Dr C, that Dr L was not to touch their animals. Unfortunately, one of Dr Cs biggest fans was a mentally ill cat lady. I don't know how many cats she had exactly, but she came in a few times a month with multiple cats each time. The problem was they kept breeding. And breeding. And inbreeding. And inbreeding some more. Dr C managed to finally start altering them when he got a local pet rescue to agree to help fund it. One of the saddest things I ever saw was when we went to spay what was a very young cat, probably about two years old. She was kind of messed up... her face looked weird and she had something fucky going on with her spine and how she walked. But we got her open, and found out she was pregnant already. One of the kittens had anencephaly (For you non-googlers out there, it's a severe deformation of the skull and brain. Basically, the stop of the skull never forms, and the kittens frontal and central brain never formed. Pretty much, they only have a brain stem which is the part of the brain that controls things like your breathing, the most basic things you need to live. Humans born with this only live a few months at the most) and a few of the other kittens were pretty deformed. We quietly euthanized  all of the kittens and didn't tell the woman about it. Over the two years I worked there, we actually got most of her cats altered. She would bring them in in batches, and after every batch we'd get a thank you card in the mail. I felt terrible for the cats, but I felt really  bad for her. She had the best intentions and clearly loved her cats, she just wasn't mentally capable enough to know what they needed and what was best for them.

The last story for tonight was the first time I ever raised my voice with a client (I am very soft spoken and polite to a fault; I get anxious instead of angry). He brought in his ancient lab to be euthanized. I took euthanizations very seriously. I'm kind of bad at emotions and stuff, but I've had pets put to sleep, and it's heart breaking. Being as kind and gentle as you can be with the animal and owner is important to me. So I came into the room with the sedative and the euthasol (the drug that stops the heart) already in syringes. I started to explain how I would sedate the dog and let him have as long with the dog as he wanted before I did the second injection, and the dog would pass in about a minuet. The guy rolled his eyes and said something along the lines of "I don't care. I wanted to dump him in the woods but my wife made me do this". I was aghast. I asked him how the hell he could live with a dog for 10+ years and have no emotional connection with it. He said "it's just a dog". At that point I asked him to get the fuck out and pay at the desk. I spent about twenty minuets petting  and cuddling the dog and giving him treats before I euthanised him. There was a good chance that was the most love and attention he'd gotten in years, maybe in his whole life. I'm getting teared up just thinking about it. Mos of what I saw at the clinic was the result of ignorance or just neglect, but that was the only time I felt just total apathy from a pet owner. It still disturbs me to think about him.


----------



## Bugaboo (Sep 28, 2015)

I think declawing cats just cause people don't want to get scratched or have their furniture clawed up should be an illegal. I know 2 people who have declawed cats and I just don't understand. If you can't take the claws, why get the cat? Like I used to get pinched by hermit crabs (well, just 1 of them was the big offended) all the time and I just deal with it because that's what they do and it comes with the package. 

Speaking of cutting of things that shouldn't be cut off, I want to punch people right in the nuts who de-fang their tarantulas. Because of the nature of the spider's digestive system it can only eat liquid so when it catches it's prey it injects venom from it's fangs to liquify the insides and then it drinks them, with the fangs gone the animal physically cannot eat. If you can't accept that if you own tarantulas, sooner or later you will be bitten, perhaps a tarantula is not the right animal for you. Some pet stores do this to the tarantulas they sell and it just boggles the mind. 

I also have so, so many stories about extreme hermit crab neglect and abuse, people tend not to care about their welfare because "they're just bugs"
Some of you may know that before THE INCIDENT, I used to rescue hermit crabs and had a large tank they all lived in. Anyway the people I got them from every single time are like "the kids got bored come take them" put in the conditons of my tank, at least one crab was always out and about which is a testimate to the care they were given in my tank since hermies are generally nocturnal. Anyway, crabs need humidity to physcially breathe, in conditons with humdity lower than 70% they aren't as active, under 60% will cause irreversible gill damage and they will actually start to slowly suffocate to death (the proper conditons are 80%) and of course all of these tanks the crabs came in were bone dry with less than an inch of substrate and always pellet food (which is actually toxic to them) so no shit the kids got bored because the crabs were in the corner slowly dying. Also whenever I took in crabs they always gave me "supplies" and it was all useless shit like "hermit crab salt" (the only salt water mix suitable for hermit crabs is marine grade stuff like instant ocean because it successfully recreates the trace minerals needed for their continued health) "hermit crab food" (read: toxic shit) and sponges which only harbor bacteria and smell funny are are usless unless you want to break them into small pieces and feed to the crabs.
Also if you keep a crab in a wire cage on gravel I will come to your house and give you dirty looks from across the street and steal your crab when you're not looking because no sensible human can look at that and say "yes, a living creature would be happy in there"


----------



## CrispyBacon (Sep 28, 2015)

I don't have any horror stories to share, but I really do hate going into pet stores and seeing their reptiles being improperly cared for, or care sheets with incorrect or downright dangerous information. 

If you're going to own a reptile, or any type of pet, do your own research from multiple sources and never just take the pet store at its word.


----------



## Bugaboo (Sep 28, 2015)

CrispyBacon said:


> I don't have any horror stories to share, but I really do hate going into pet stores and seeing their reptiles being improperly cared for, or care sheets with incorrect or downright dangerous information.
> 
> If you're going to own a reptile, or any type of pet, do your own research from multiple sources and never just take the pet store at its word.


In general asking a pet store for any kind of animal related advice is a bad idea. If I have to ask someone at the store where something is and they're all like "what's it for" and I say hermit crab or tarantula they're gonna try to sell me something wildly inappropriate especially if it's something for a crab like I'm looking for the instant ocean and they're like "oh take this hermit crab salt instead" and I'm like " all your crabs die within .5 of a femtosecond and there's a reason why"
I've only come across 2 stores that actually know what they're talking about and those are the only 2 stores I will give my business to and neither carry hermit crabs because the process to collect them, ship them and then distribute them is barbaric and crabs can't breed in captivity (at least only 3 people have managed to get crabs to mate and raise the babies to the stage where they are fully terrestrial) so the collection of crabs for the pet trade is inhumane and not sustainable


----------



## For The Internet (Sep 28, 2015)

Bugaboo said:


> In general asking a pet store for any kind of animal related advice is a bad idea. If I have to ask someone at the store where something is and they're all like "what's it for" and I say hermit crab or tarantula they're gonna try to sell me something wildly inappropriate especially if it's something for a crab like I'm looking for the instant ocean and they're like "oh take this hermit crab salt instead" and I'm like " all your crabs die within .5 of a femtosecond and there's a reason why"
> I've only come across 2 stores that actually know what they're talking about and those are the only 2 stores I will give my business to and neither carry hermit crabs because the process to collect them, ship them and then distribute them is barbaric and crabs can't breed in captivity (at least only 3 people have managed to get crabs to mate and raise the babies to the stage where they are fully terrestrial) so the collection of crabs for the pet trade is inhumane and not sustainable


 Could you please direct me to some information about that? I've never owned hermit crabs and I never intend to (I have my hands full with 3 cats, 7 birds and sometimes ratties), but I'm always interested in learning more about animal welfare so I can help educate people about pet shops and what those animals go through.

Personally I think it should be illegal for pet stores to carry live animals without thorough regular welfare checks and permits, and I also think anywhere that allows the declawing of cats doesn't deserve to have cats. I don't want to know anyone who would ever consider such a thing, especially vets who are supposed to protect and love animals and know exactly what the process entails and how pointless and cruel it is.


----------



## Bugaboo (Sep 28, 2015)

For The Internet said:


> Could you please direct me to some information about that? I've never owned hermit crabs and I never intend to (I have my hands full with 3 cats, 7 birds and sometimes ratties), but I'm always interested in learning more about animal welfare so I can help educate people about pet shops and what those animals go through.
> 
> Personally I think it should be illegal for pet stores to carry live animals without thorough regular welfare checks and permits, and I also think anywhere that allows the declawing of cats doesn't deserve to have cats. I don't want to know anyone who would ever consider such a thing, especially vets who are supposed to protect and love animals and know exactly what the process entails and how pointless and cruel it is.


The most up to date info on crab care is found on a facebook group called "Hermit Crab Owners" they keep discovering new things to improve the captive lives of crabs and the information has changed a lot even in just the past year. For example some of the things that were discovered recently
-UVB lights were recently deemed essential for the crab's tank
-Discovered crabs enjoy walking on hamster wheels (it has to be a specific model so that the crabs don't get their legs caught in little holes)
-Information was documented on crab limb deformities where they grow like, a leg claw
-Leaf litter (dead leaves from crab safe trees) were deemed an essential part of the hermit crab diet
-We found out crabs have complex eyes and can see more colors than we can (discovered from the brain of an ancient crab fossil which was incredibly similar to today's purple pincher hermit crabs)
In the past the Hermit Crab Association was ths go to source for all things crab but they seem to be stuck in the older ways afraid to try new things, Hermit Crab Owners has the best information out there right now
Edit: I'll ask on the group for like photos and eye witness testaments of hermit crab collection, shipping and distribution they probably have a lot documented, they have a lot of documented "pet store horror" photos, shit like moldy dead crabs, rainbow gravel and crabs clinging to the sides of wire cages. I'll pm you the stuff I find


----------



## For The Internet (Sep 28, 2015)

Bugaboo said:


> The most up to date info on crab care is found on a facebook group called "Hermit Crab Owners" they keep discovering new things to improve the captive lives of crabs and the information has changed a lot even in just the past year. For example some of the things that were discovered recently
> -UVB lights were recently deemed essential for the crab's tank
> -Discovered crabs enjoy walking on hamster wheels (it has to be a specific model so that the crabs don't get their legs caught in little holes)
> -Information was documented on crab limb deformities where they grow like, a leg claw
> ...



Thanks for that, I'm particularly interested in the conditions you mentioned for transportation and where they come from. It makes me very sad that people act as if Hermit Crabs can't feel suffering or enjoyment.

I used to work in a nature education centre a few years back. It had a ton of reptiles including a sizeable goanna, as well as small mammals like rats and mice (bred as feeders), dunnarts and hopping mice (native Australian rodents), sugar gliders and even a little bilby (an endagered Australian marsupial). It also had fish, axolotls and some insects like stick insects and native spiders.

The conditions in this place were _deplorable._ All of the cages/tanks were far too small. The ones up front where the classes of kids came were in much better condition than the ones out back where only employees went, but were still pretty bad. The hopping mice were really overcrowded, the fish and axolotl tanks were always covered in algae and the insect cages were tiny. The bilby was supposedly the big draw since they're rare to see in captivity but it never _once_ left its little house the entire time I worked there. It was kind of a running joke that we weren't even sure there really was a bilby there at all.

That was, as I mentioned, up the front in the public area and it was bad enough. It was the employees only section that really turned my stomach, though.

The rodent cages were all _massively_ overcrowded. The animals didn't even have 3 square inches to themselves. They were all constantly mating and inbreeding and it was terrible. The dunnarts were kept in the 'hot room' (a climate controlled room that was always at desert-like temperatures - we also had a cold room) and their diet consisted of literally nothing but canned dog food, which would quickly go rancid in the 100+ degree room. Dunnarts in the wild mostly live on insects and small prey like tiny lizards but they're omnivorous and clearly needed better things to eat than only the cheapest, shittiest canned dog food there was. There were also stick insects kept in the hot room, and while I worked there there was a population explosion and they all escaped when they weren't fed for a while and most of them ended up crawling into the dunnart cages, where they were promptly eaten. I had to spend two whole days rounding up stray stick insects.

The rats and mice were kept in extremely crowded, dirty cages. They constantly bred. Often the new babies would be killed so they could be fed to smaller reptiles. The rats usually got to live to adulthood before they were culled to be fed to the snakes. Rats are my favourite animals and I accept that it's natural for them to be fed to reptiles, but what bothered me wasn't that they were bred as food, but that they had to live in such appalling conditions and the way they killed them. Baby mice would simply be hurled to the floor, where the impact usually caused a fairly swift death. Adult mice would be held by the tail and whacked hard against the edge of a table. The ones that didn't die on impact had their necks broken with knives. The rats were the worst of all, because rats are such intelligent, sensitive animals. They'd grab them by the tail and whack them against the pavement outside. I have no idea how many survived and had to be hit a second time because I couldn't witness my favourite animals being killed in such a barbaric way. I often supervised the mouse deaths so I could point out survivors and make sure their suffering was ended as the employees doing the job usually failed to notice.

I got so desperate at one point that I started smuggling baby rats home in my handbag so at least some of them could lead happy, long lives where they were loved and well cared for.

The reptiles themselves didn't receive much better treatment. Their enclosures were too small, but the main issue was the constant epic plague of mites. The entire time I worked there the poor reptiles were crawling with mites. They got in everywhere; under their scales, in their eyelids, in their ears. It was usually my job to pick off the mites and give each reptile a mite bath and coat them in anti-mite powder. There were dozens of reptiles so it was a very laborious task. They were never all de-mited at once so they caught them back almost as soon as I was done removing them. I even had to give the very large and pissy goanna mite baths. He was easier to treat in some ways because he didn't have scales they could burrow under, but trying to remove mites from the corners of an enraged goanna's mouth resulted in dozens of bites. He'd also literally shit all over me the whole time and foul up the water so I'd have to change it and start again.

The outdoor cages with the sugar gliders, rabbits and guinea pigs were every bit as bad. They were foul. There was literally no place on the ground or bedding that wasn't covered in shit. In fact, the rabbits had taken to sleeping in their litter trays and avoiding the rest of the enclosure. The sugar glider enclosures were especially vile because of all the fruit that was rotting and mouldering on the ground.

I ended up having to quit because it was making me extremely depressed and emotional working there. No matter how hard I tried I was too low on the totem pole to make any changes. There were way too many animals for me to be able to single-handedly keep them clean and nobody there seemed to give any fucks about the conditions or improving them.

There was only ever one animal there that I ever saw treated well, and that was a massive sulphur-crested cockatoo who belonged to my boss. She adored that bird and brought him to work every day. HE wasn't crammed into a tiny cage with no stimulation and the cheapest food there was. He was allowed free range and stayed on a perch in the open. Everyone had to walk past him to get up the steps to the office and he was an absolutely foul-tempered bird. Every single time anyone walked by him he would launch at them and try to bite them, and my boss found that hilarious. Cockatoos are very intelligent and he was very pleased with the reaction his attacks would get from his owner and from the employees so it just encouraged things. At the time I was very afraid of large birds so it really freaked me out when he'd launch at me. My boss actually yelled at me one time because I said 'No!' very firmly to the bird when it grabbed my shirt and tore it. To this day, even though I own birds (including a fairly large cockatoo) I can't stand sulphur-crested cockatoos and avoid them.

The worst part is that it was a nature education center. We were supposed to educate kids about Australian wildlife and teach them to love and respect animals and care for them. We were supposed to set an example and all we did was make hundreds of animals live short, horrible lives.


It's actually been kind of therapeutic to type that all out, sorry it's such a novel. I love all animals and it deeply disturbed me to be in a position where I saw such horrific neglect and couldn't do anything about it.

tl;dr: I worked in the most reprehensible hellhole in Australia


----------



## Red (Sep 28, 2015)

I had a guy come in complaining about how his tank was always dirty despite weekly water changes and he had two oscars and a common pleco in a fucking FOUR GALLON FLUVAL CHI. WHY WHY WHY
And no, he didn't get a bigger tank.

I'd reccomend you amend your first post though, betas can't live in bowls period, water changes or not. They need at least 5.5 gallons, but 10 is much better. They're from slow-flowing water bodies and daily water changes is extremely stressful for them. On top of that bowls can't be consistently heated to the 79 degrees they need. No fish should be in anything but a fully cycled tank period.

More people need to learn the nitrogen cycle. Ugh.

Fish keeping in general drives me crazy. Cichlids are known to show complex social behaviors and some species learn new things on the same level as APES. Yet people are willing to get them as decorations and neglect them. A best friend of mine is a cichlid keeper who literally devotes her life to her fish. She spends months creating a tank that is the correct size and uses decor that matches their natural environment as best as she can. She literally has hundreds of gallons of tanks between her home and her cousin's where she keeps the larger tanks. So many cichlid keepers are hellbent on filling their tank with as many fish as possible, but she rarely ever has more than 2 species of fish per tank, and even then they're always ones that naturally live together. If you want some good fishkeeping, check her out. 

ETA: I fucking hate when people feed discus beef heart. Like really? Fucking really? You're going to feed an animal whose diet is almost entirely plant matter in the wild a carnivorous diet, and on top of that, something from a mammal? Which most fish don't have the correct metabolism to digest? Dear God. 
Who looks at a fucking living peacock dinner plate and thinks "yeah, that body is designed for leaping out of the water and burrowing into the flesh of ungulate mammals"


----------



## MW 002 (Sep 28, 2015)

Goofy Logic said:


> People who own horses can be some of the most arrogant, stuck up pricks one can encounter.  If you have horses yourself, they can view you as competition and become even more arrogant.  We had one woman call mom and tell her it was a PRIVILEGE for us to hire the farrier on the day he was supposed to be working on HER horses (It was a short appointment, and the farrier had lots of time before having to go to the woman).
> 
> One of the biggest mistakes horse owners can do is buy alfalfa hay.  Cattle (especially dairy cattle) need lots of nutrients in their feed because of their odd digestive cycle, and so Alfalfa hay is considered superior over grass hay (It doesnt help that alfalfa hay is almost double the price of grass hay, and some owners have that "Special Snowflake" mentality about their horse).  Alfalfa is a legume, meaning it is full of nitrates, and horses are extremely sensitive to nitrogen.  So a lot of horse owners buy Alfalfa hay , feed nothing but alfalfa to them, then wonder why the poor horse gets laminitus (founder) and is crippled for life.


You just highlighted the very reason I don't work in the horse industry anymore. The farm owner was fucking nuts, she would insist on having a "one shoe size fits all" feeding system on her horses... Then wondered why her one show horse was getting obese. To be honest, that horse didn't even need grain he just needed more turn out so he can exercise more- but she assumed lunging once a day and a few hours of turn out was good enough. I was there for about a year.

There also was sheep there too. To make a long story short, she bought an emaciated herd of them from an auction and placed them with the healthier sheep a month later- then five months later, most sheep in that hers were starting to get sick. Early on I kept informing her of the ewes and lambs getting diarrhea and losing weight... All that ended up happening was increasing the grain- which didn't help because it kept getting worse. 

When it came to lambs dying from this illness, instead of sending carcasses in for post mortem exams (to check for diseases) she just blamed the staff for not"paying enough attention". 

At the same time with her, anytime horses got loose it was the fault of the staff. If horses got hurt, it was the fault of the staff. If anything went wrong, it was the staff's fault. 

I then got sick of the blame game and promptly quit.


----------



## toulouse (Sep 28, 2015)

I had a couple come in yesterday wanting to purchase a pair of goldfish but they were utterly clueless about them, especially their space requirement. I did what I could to explain basic care, but everything I said was met with blank stares and "hmm"ing. The boyfriend brought me a 2.5 gallon tank and asked if that was enough for a pair of goldfish, and then looked deeply confused when I mentioned goldfish need a lot more room than that, and a filter. We have a dollar per gallon sale going on right now, so I tried to convince him to get a bigger tank because most of them wound up being cheaper than the 2.5, but he got all up in arms and was like "I'll buy the smaller tank somewhere for cheaper!" and he and his girlfriend took the goldfish and left.

They did not find somewhere cheaper, because they came back an hour later because they wanted to return the fish.

Sometime last week, in the wee hours of the morning, someone left a cardboard box with two bunnies outside our door for the opening manager to find. They were crazy hungry and the male had nails so long they sort of curled under his paws and he hopped a little funny because of it. We don't sell rabbits, so we ended up having to adopt them out, but they did get a pretty decent ending-- a regular customer came in and completely fell in love with them, and ended up taking both.

We sell like these little games for dog-- there's a bunch of different ones, but the gist of it is you put kibble or treats in a chamber, and the dog has to sniff it out and flip a lid or press a button or something like that. I had a lady bring up one that worked like a slot machine, and she asked me if this would be good as a feeder for when she was out of town. I told her about the automatic feeders we already sell, and apparently those were too expensive for her.


----------



## Bugaboo (Sep 28, 2015)

Red said:


> I had a guy come in complaining about how his tank was always dirty despite weekly water changes and he had two oscars and a common pleco in a fucking FOUR GALLON FLUVAL CHI. WHY WHY WHY
> And no, he didn't get a bigger tank.
> 
> I'd reccomend you amend your first post though, betas can't live in bowls period, water changes or not. They need at least 5.5 gallons, but 10 is much better. They're from slow-flowing water bodies and daily water changes is extremely stressful for them. On top of that bowls can't be consistently heated to the 79 degrees they need. No fish should be in anything but a fully cycled tank period.
> ...


I don't agree with keeping bettas in bowls but some people I know have done it successfully and have had healthy, long lived bettas (8 years plus) and the whole aquarium society is like "yeah that's fine" so little old me has no place to argue. 
Of course these are the same people who have like, 12+ bettas so maybe they need to tone it down a lil'
Personally I have a 10 gallon and some equipment set aside for a betta

Also, one of the stores I go to keep live mice and rats to sell as feeders and to feed to their own animals. I went there one day and the guy was about to feed a big ol' lizard so he grabs a mouse, I turn away for one second and turn back and bam the mouse is dead as shit. He had quickly severed it's spine or snapped it's neck or something (he had said he snapped it's neck quickly) within like a split second and  I think if you really must feed a fresh rodent to an animal (either because they're picky or you're trying to get them on frozen) that's probably the best way to do it because
-the mouse feels nothing
-the animal eating is in no danger of being bitten or scratched

Also people who feed live mice to tarantulas are batshit insane. Animals like crickets don't have the capacity to feel pain the way a mouse does and when the tarantula bites that mouse, it's guts are liquified and it dies slowly and it may bite the tarantula and if it gets bitten in a well placed way then you're gonna have 1 less tarantula


----------



## Coldgrip (Sep 28, 2015)

From the Retail thread:


Bugaboo said:


> I don't remember if I had said this but when I was working at a pet store fucking people kept coming in and asking how to care for baby red eared sliders they found crossing the road. Mother fucker you put that shit back because
> -It's illegal to take a wild animal from the wild and keep it in captivity without a lisence in Ontario and to get a lisence you need to be a vet of some sort doing wildlife rehab
> -The turtles weren't injured, they were just a babies crossing the road, just pick them up, put them at the other side and drive away
> -Red eared sliders get fucking massive, males are smallest and they need at least a 75 gallon tank


Shouldn't the turtle of been surrendered to the Humane Society instead? Red Eared Sliders are considered an invasive species north of Mexico.


----------



## Rabbit Bones (Sep 28, 2015)

I used to be big into snakes... I had about 20 at the height of things. And yeah... I killed the mice and rats before I fed them. I felt bad about it (the rats in paticular, because I've had rats as pets and know what smart, wonderful little animals they are) but the only time I live fed was horrifying. It takes so long for the mouse to be killed, and they suffer so much. Me just... dispatching the rodent before just seemed like the more humane thing to do, and I didn't have to worry about my snakes being bitten. I considered buying frozen ones, but there's no guarantee that they were kept in better conditions or killed any more painlessly than I could do on my own. 

I've heard about some people putting the mice in the freezer in tupperware until they die of hypothermia. Those people are monsters. It would be more humane to just toss it alive to the snake.


----------



## Overcast (Sep 28, 2015)

I used to remember this pet shop several years back that my family and I would visit that had a bunch of puppies. I used to love playing with them a little. Later on we found out the place got closed down because the puppies in there were sick and not properly cared for. 

Anyway, my grandmother is pretty much your stereotypical cat lady. She had dozens of cats over the course of her life, and she's always willing to find more from the streets and care for them. At that point, she would either send them to an animal shelter or keep them for herself. Usually the latter.  At the very least, she fixes her cats and keeps the males and females separate. But I've been to her house several times before and the house always stunk of cats and had dandruff and dust everywhere. It was kinda hard to breathe in there.

One day, we went inside one of the cat rooms and I found that she had this one feral cat and essentially trapped it in this tiny makeshift tunnel using the furniture and some blankets. And the only place the cat can go is into the closet. It spends pretty much its entire life in there with nowhere else to go. The same kinda goes with the rest of her cats. As stated previously, the males and females are separated into different rooms and aren't really allowed to go anywhere else in the house. They don't even really get to go outside either. The closest thing to that is this tunnel that connected to the house that leads to a shed in the backyard which has windows.

She also likes to leave food out in front of her house so stray cats and other animals get to eat on her front porch. The neighbors complained about this as that can lead to vermin invading. 

I really don't understand what goes through her mind to be honest. She's not a bad person, but her obsession with cats has taken over her life. It's gotten to the point where my dad, her son, can't really stand to be around her anymore because she almost always talks about cats.


----------



## Bugaboo (Sep 28, 2015)

Coldgrip said:


> From the Retail thread:
> 
> Shouldn't the turtle of been surrendered to the Humane Society instead? Red Eared Sliders are considered an invasive species north of Mexico.


I wasn't aware of that honestly, so I should have told them to take it to the local reptile rescue because they take in and adopt out red eared sliders all the time


----------



## Overcast (Sep 28, 2015)

For The Internet said:


> Thanks for that, I'm particularly interested in the conditions you mentioned for transportation and where they come from. It makes me very sad that people act as if Hermit Crabs can't feel suffering or enjoyment.
> 
> I used to work in a nature education centre a few years back. It had a ton of reptiles including a sizeable goanna, as well as small mammals like rats and mice (bred as feeders), dunnarts and hopping mice (native Australian rodents), sugar gliders and even a little bilby (an endagered Australian marsupial). It also had fish, axolotls and some insects like stick insects and native spiders.
> 
> ...



Goddamn. I feel for you and those animals. I had to google to see what a goanna looked like and yikes! That thing looks like it can bite pretty hard.


----------



## Trapped_Fairy (Sep 28, 2015)

These are some stories from back when I was just starting horseback riding at a rather large riding school, by large I mean the instructor, a kindly, but tough old woman named Miss Nancy, owned and cared for around 50 ponies and full sized horses with her staff. Her horses were always in brilliant shape and she often took in abused, neglected, or "troublesome" horses and rehabilitated them, even when they seemed hopeless to everyone else.

The first one is about Raphial, a beautiful black stallion, who was kept penned up by himself far from the other horses. On my first day there, I couldn't help but ask about him as one of the girls mentioned that no one was allowed to ride him except Miss Nancy. I was told it was simply because he was very temperamental and  wouldn't let anyone else near him, horse or person, let alone ride him. I left it at that for then, but later decided to ask Miss Nancy myself, wanting to know the full story behind him. It turns out that before his rescue, he was severely neglected, I mean, barely ever fed,unloved, and barely alive. He had major trust issues, understandably, and had a tendency to act out against anything near him. To this day, Miss Nancy is the only person he will let care for him at all.

Now, for story two. I was taking the beginner horse, a chestnut colored mare named Ginger, out of the stables and getting her prepped for riding, when she just decided to relieve herself while I was putting on her saddle. I lightheartedly scolded her, since she barely missed my shoes, and my instructor scolded me, telling me not to say that. It turned out that Ginger's abuse had been that her old owners would beat her whenever she dared use the restroom. She was so terrified that she would literally hold it until she was stabled every night and then absolutely wreck her stall with waste.  I immediately apologized both to Miss Nancy and Ginger after learning this. Ginger is one of the sweetest horses at the stables, patient and loving. I was just flabberghasted that anyone would hurt that gentle soul. She always tries and veers towards another horse at the stables, Jennifer, who is her fully grown baby, just so they can see each other a little more. She has such a big heart despite what she's been through.


----------



## Ido (Sep 28, 2015)

A few years ago my mom was a dating this guy, his three children were in their mid-twenties to early-thirties and they were all living with him, they didn't pay rent, nor did they do anything for themselves. I only really met one of them, his daughter who I'll call Bitch. Now Bitch had a Bearded Dragon so she brought him to my house one time because I have one too. Bitch brought her's in a cricket container, it was pretty big, and it's legs were blue because she used calcium sand. My beardie attacked the poor thing when I brought my laptop out (he thinks it's his) and so she put him back in the catcher before leaving an hour or so later. There house was awful, it needed to be put on hoarders or something, my god, but I went to see the poor guy and he was in the basment, a place they barely went, his cage was filthy, the only thing he had to stimulate himself with was the TV and those bastards put it on a timer so they didn't have to go down there). It came out that the daughter wasn't feeding her beardie anything but those pellets you soak in water for about half a day (usually the crickets eat them, not the beardies) and she'd leave it in for 1-3 days at a time because she had school. Both my mom and I yelled at her and begged for her to give him to us, even if ours fought with him he'd be living a much better life than he was with her, but she fucking refused and got more animals she couldn't take care of. Her dad admitted to feeling bad, said he caught a grasshopper outside and gave it to him (that pissed me off because it could have be diseased) We lost contact after bitch slapped my mom in the face, in a restaurant, in front of someone I've known and went to school with all of my life. I doubt the poor thing is alive today, I desperately want to know whats become of the poor thing, I've thought of opening contact with bitch, if only to find out, but she fucking slapped my mom and I want nothing to do with her.


Oh god I still feel really bad about this one. One of my relatives wanted a beardie for her kids (she has four) because she loved mine. Her family is shit with animals though, they keep their dogs in the laundry room (and wonder why one of them has an attitude problems), while their cats get free roam. She got the first one for her second child and two days later her 3rd child wanted her own, so they went out and got another one a week later. I was over, but one of the cages was partially off the desk, I remember asking the kids if they could put it elsewhere, or take the shelves off of the desk it was on (because that was a thing that could happen), I was told no, their mom refused to take the shelf thing off. Okay, whatever. I believe it was the next day we get a call that the cat had jumped on the shelves and knocked 100 crickets on the floor, oh how my mom and I laughed... until not even 10 minutes later we got a frantic call from the kids, the cat had also jumped on top of the cage, the thing shattered, the new beardie they had gotten the day had been hit with the black bar thing that surrounds the top of the cage directly across his back, it wasn't doing well. Their parents were at work, so my mom and I rushed over to do what we could. The poor thing wasn't doing well. not at all, couldn't move his back legs, I helped clean up the room where the crickets escaped, and we all sat around and waited for their father (who was on his way home to deal with the crisis), he picked up 3rd child and beardie and went to the pet store. They were gone for some time and when they came back they had a new cage... and a new beardie? Their father said that he used the sick pet warranty to trade the hurt one in for a different one, they didn't even say he got hurt, just that he was sick, I'm getting emotional just thinking about it. The people at the pet store had no idea what was really wrong. when we left their house after everything was under control I broke down, when we got home I had my mom call up to the pet store to check up on him, the vet was going to be coming in a few days from then, I remember mom calling the next day and someone had said they had put him in water and he seemed to perk up a bit, but the day after that I believe he passed away. That little thing could have gotten the help it DESERVED if they had told the truth, or it could have been put out of its misery, but no, just say it's sick and get a replacement. They gave them away recently, we haven't been close so I didn't really know, they hardly got their cages cleaned or were taken out, the little guys probably better off. 

There is no such thing as a throwaway put and I will fight anyone who thinks otherwise.


----------



## Red (Sep 28, 2015)

Ido said:


> There is no such thing as a throwaway put and I will fight anyone who thinks otherwise.


I just lost my beardie. They're great pets and the fact someone would do these things to such amazing animals breaks my heart.
I would've taken all of those babies in a heartbeat. I miss Pancake


----------



## Ido (Sep 28, 2015)

Red said:


> I just lost my beardie. They're great pets and the fact someone would do these things to such amazing animals breaks my heart.
> I would've taken all of those babies in a heartbeat. I miss Pancake


They are wonderful, wonderful animals, sorry to hear about yours, I'm sure Pancake was amazing.


----------



## sea panther (Sep 28, 2015)

I'm really glad that the barn I'm at now is just a lowkey rough board place where everyone just kinda does their own thing. No points chasers, no elitists, just an old cowboy with a bunch of rescue horses, a lady with a pair of mustangs and a couple of others who just trail ride for fun. My pony is a rescue too.

We did have trouble with a nutjob lady who was getting free board in exchange for snow plowing in the winter from her brother in law. She seemed really nice at first, like one day she thought my pony was colicking and called me, saying she would walk her until I got there. But soon she stopped coming out to take care of her horses, and she reneged on the promise of a free snow plow - my barn owner wound up having to agree to pay the plower, but crazy lady convinced him he wouldn't get his money and actually got him to _plow them in_. We're in New England, we had 3 blizzards and record breaking snowfall, and it was all piled up in the driveway. Barn owner couldn't leave, and we couldn't get in to take care of our horses. It was awful.

Eventually one of the farriers called the SPCA on them because their horses were getting in such bad shape. They came and visited, something I was sadly not there to witness, and although they didn't take the horses, the lady packed up her horses and left a week later.

But yeah, I was in the USPC from age 9 to 16, and for something that is geared towards being a learning experience and team building, the people were absolutely nuts and it was more about how much money the parents were willing to spend on the horses - heard more than one kid bragging about their $20,000 pony that they would outgrow in a year or two. It was a common occurrence to see the parents at each other's throats and cursing and screaming, and there are a lot of little kids at these pony club rallies. Even our rag tag chapter had its share of crazies and elitists, eventually to the point where it split, and the crazy people made their own chapter (thankfully), but it sucked because us kids had to compete against our friends, and it turned every rally into some middle school mean girls scenario where they'd show up at our area and talk a bunch of shit.

tldr; yep horse people are crazy :')


----------



## Cosmos (Sep 28, 2015)

I can't even vocalize my disgust for people who neglect and/or abuse animals. We really need to start hammering in that animals are living and in many cases _thinking_ creatures who deserve to be treated with respect. If you can't handle looking after another living being, then you need to get a stuffed animal instead.

As for my own story, my brother and sister and I used to own some hermit crabs when I was around 10-11. We got them at a mall after begging our mom to buy them. I named mine Sandy. Unfortunately, it didn't take too long for it to sink in that hermit crabs probably weren't the best pet for me; crabs are creepily bug-like, and I've always been totally phobic of bugs of any kind. So yeah, probably not the best idea. 

We ended up keeping them in my brother's room. I remember that, soon after we got them, Sandy went missing. I was concerned but, as I said, I had grown a little afraid of her so I wasn't freaking out or anything. Anyway, about a day later, I was sitting down in our basement using the computer. Suddenly, Sandy crawled out from behind the computer and started walking towards me. I almost had a heart attack. To put it into perspective, Sandy somehow managed to crawl out of her cage, out of my brother's room, down the stairs, across the first floor, down the basement stairs, into the computer room, and then up the desk. My mom proposed that she might have hitched a ride on my dog or even one of us, but to this day I have no idea what the fuck happened.

Anyway, eventually my mom threw them away because she thought they were dead. By that point we had lost interest in them (and I was fucking scared of Sandy and her teleportation powers) so it was no huge loss. Then we discovered that hermit crabs actually live for a long time and ours were probably still alive when my mom threw them away. We all felt guilty but hey, at least it wasn't intentional. We've also never invested in more pets, solely focusing our love and devotion on our dog, Clancy. That's probably for the best. She's very jealous, haha.


----------



## fishercat (Sep 28, 2015)

So there's this lovely little pet store near where I live. It's really small, and the pet housing is slightly lackluster, but they take good care of their animals with what they have and they even give out little booklets with each animal that tells the new owners the basics. Because of this reputation, people will often bring animals in for them to sell.

Apparently one lady was driving along the highway, and she noticed a large bag on the side of the road. For some reason she decided to pull over and investigate the bag, and inside she found seven squirming baby rats. This was in the middle of January. So she rushed the poor things to the pet store instead of a vet. The store owner took one look at the dying rats, thanked the woman for finding them, and immediately sent someone to take them to a vet.

Those rats had been dying of hypothermia, and that lady decided to take them to a pet store instead of a vet. _Why.
_
There's a happy ending, though! All but two of the rats managed to pull through, and once they'd gotten stronger they were given back to the pet store to be sold. I visited them once; they were really cute, fat, happy gray-and-white balls of fluff. I heard that they all went to good homes.

Still though, _why would you take dying animals to a pet store?!_


----------



## John Titor (Sep 28, 2015)

My cousin (one I don't get along with) had her outdoor (keyword: outdoor) cat declawed and nonchalantly wondered why it disappeared.

Gee, I too wonder why an animal that has it's main weapon and tool removed went missing, you dumb bitch.


----------



## Tailypo (Sep 28, 2015)

I know this one lady who is "friends" with my mom (by "friends," I mean, "she latched onto my mom like a parasite and won't leave her alone") and she is absolute shit with animals. 

She used to have a chihuahua named Jose, who is the sweetest little thing and had fallen into the wrong hands. One day she invited me and my mom for lunch at her apartment and that's when I first saw Jose. He had a urinary problem where he would randomly piss everywhere and instead of taking him to a vet, his dumbass owner made him wear doggy diapers. Because of his constant pissing, the diapers would quickly end up smelling horrible. She also rarely let him in her apartment and forced the poor thing to sleep out on her balcony. When we were visiting, she let Jose in because I had requested it. The little dog then begged for food as we sat down to eat, so my mom and I tossed him some scraps because we felt bad for him. Instead of chewing the food like a normal dog, he swallowed it immediately like a vacuum cleaner and begged for more. I then found out that the only food his owner fed him is some cheap dry food that barely had any nutrients in it. When I petted him, I felt a bald patch on his neck, possibly from the lack of nourishment. Luckily, Jose had a happy ending. The woman's eldest daughter (who is a hundred times smarter than her mother) took him away with her and I can only hope that he's getting the proper treatment that he needs. 

Then this lady got _another pet._

This time it's a cat named Kita (I know, what an original name). She wasted no time in getting the cat declawed after Kita scratched her furniture, and the poor thing had problems with her recovery. Soon the cat turned mean and began biting anyone who tried to touch her. Dumbass is literally too stupid to understand why the cat became so hostile. What's even worse is that Kita got into some accident that broke her tail, and instead of taking her to a vet, her idiotic owner _cut the tail off herself._ And she's _proud of this._ Kita's living conditions were no better: her litter box was out on the balcony, her food was the same cheap dry food that Jose was fed with, and she had no toys to entertain herself with. Fortunately, she also had a happy ending. Moron's youngest daughter and ex-husband took the cat away with them. 

Honestly, whenever I see this woman, I get an intense urge to slap her across the face.


----------



## Rabbit Bones (Sep 28, 2015)

Declawing makes cats mean as shit. I've only met one person with a declawed cat (they had adopted her like that) who was sweet. They also learn how to ninja kick you to scratch you with their back claws, and they bite. Bites from cats can be dangerous, they have a lot of bacteria in their mouths. I got severely bitten by a cat at the clinic once, and the next day my hand was massively swollen and red. I was on antibiotics for a while.

I've often said if you have to cut parts off an animal to make it fit into your life style, you don't need to have that animal. Spaying and neutering being the only exception. Tail docking, ear cutting, declawing... they're all painful and unnecessary. People who get monkeys as pets have all their teeth pulled out to try and make them less dangerous, Savannah cats are routinely declawed and defanged. It's horrible.


----------



## Overcast (Sep 29, 2015)

Tailypo said:


> I know this one lady who is "friends" with my mom (by "friends," I mean, "she latched onto my mom like a parasite and won't leave her alone") and she is absolute shit with animals.
> 
> She used to have a chihuahua named Jose, who is the sweetest little thing and had fallen into the wrong hands. One day she invited me and my mom for lunch at her apartment and that's when I first saw Jose. He had a urinary problem where he would randomly piss everywhere and instead of taking him to a vet, his dumbass owner made him wear doggy diapers. Because of his constant pissing, the diapers would quickly end up smelling horrible. She also rarely let him in her apartment and forced the poor thing to sleep out on her balcony. When we were visiting, she let Jose in because I had requested it. The little dog then begged for food as we sat down to eat, so my mom and I tossed him some scraps because we felt bad for him. Instead of chewing the food like a normal dog, he swallowed it immediately like a vacuum cleaner and begged for more. I then found out that the only food his owner fed him is some cheap dry food that barely had any nutrients in it. When I petted him, I felt a bald patch on his neck, possibly from the lack of nourishment. Luckily, Jose had a happy ending. The woman's eldest daughter (who is a hundred times smarter than her mother) took him away with her and I can only hope that he's getting the proper treatment that he needs.
> 
> ...



As someone who has chihuahuas, it pains me to read about the poor little guy. Hope he's doing well right now.

Also, who the hell cuts their cat's tail off? That's fucked up.


Rabbit Bones said:


> Declawing makes cats mean as shit. I've only met one person with a declawed cat (they had adopted her like that) who was sweet. They also learn how to ninja kick you to scratch you with their back claws, and they bite. Bites from cats can be dangerous, they have a lot of bacteria in their mouths. I got severely bitten by a cat at the clinic once, and the next day my hand was massively swollen and red. I was on antibiotics for a while.
> 
> I've often said if you have to cut parts off an animal to make it fit into your life style, you don't need to have that animal. Spaying and neutering being the only exception. Tail docking, ear cutting, declawing... they're all painful and unnecessary. People who get monkeys as pets have all their teeth pulled out to try and make them less dangerous, Savannah cats are routinely declawed and defanged. It's horrible.



I remember when I was REALLY little, we had two cats, both of them declawed. And yet I remember one of them scratching me and making me cry. I was reminesing about the cats with my folks and told them about this and they said that that's impossible, they were declawed. I remember being scratched, so maybe she did the whole ninja kick thing you mentioned.


----------



## Elijah (Sep 29, 2015)

My young cousin had chickens, and was tasked with taking care of them. _Had_ chickens. They were kept in a dark shed with the floor caked in feces and dirty feathers. There was a mangled, rotten chicken corpse that had become one with the wire mesh in the shed, and the eggs were riddled with maggots. The poor things were so sweet too. You could touch them and hold them. My cousins shitty friend even came over and shoved them off their perches. That's what you get when you task a bratty 6 year old (!!) with managing a chicken shed, I suppose.

I believe people should have to pass a thorough house inspection, and demonstrate adequate knowledge of how to care for a specific pet, before they are allowed to own one. I'm sick of hearing about people buying critters and treating them like throwaway toys because they're too dumb to set up a proper habitat and learn about them before hand. Laws regarding animal cruelty should be much stricter, and pet store should refuse sale to anyone who doesn't have sufficient supplies or knowledge to care for animals. It kills me seeing animals being hurt. Anyone remember Boaman? I'd be surprised if he hasn't been strangled to death by his snakes yet.


----------



## Red (Sep 29, 2015)

Elijah said:


> My young cousin had chickens, and was tasked with taking care of them. _Had_ chickens. They were kept in a dark shed with the floor caked in feces and dirty feathers. There was a mangled, rotten chicken corpse that had become one with the wire mesh in the shed, and the eggs were riddled with maggots. The poor things were so sweet too. You could touch them and hold them. My cousins shitty friend even came over and shoved them off their perches. That's what you get when you task a bratty 6 year old (!!) with managing a chicken shed, I suppose.


What the fuck 
Chickens are seriously some of the best pets I've had, I can't wait until I live somewhere where I can keep them again. Who would get a pet as obscure as a chicken for their shitty children and just watch them die?


----------



## XYZpdq (Sep 29, 2015)

I once knew somebody who said his cat fell off the window in his bedroom and broke her neck.

The cat had two days previously quite successfully jumped from a falling box that was on top of a bunch of crap that she was on top of in the attic to my head and then to a safe landing spot, so this claim about a four foot height seemed suspect and he was already kinda sketchy so I stopped hanging out with him soon after.


On this general topic, the mention of crickets previously reminded me: would it be okay to give a cat a live cricket as a thing to hunt and eventually kill and eat? The onlines seem to lean towards crickets as being okay for cats, and I have a hard time working up sympathy for feeder crickets.


----------



## Shadow Fox (Sep 29, 2015)

My brother-in-law's dad was a cat hoarder.  I helped BIL clean his dad's house when the dad became too senile to live by himself anymore.  There were a lot of dead cats.  I think it broke something inside me because I can't even work up any real emotion about the numerous dead animals we found in this shit-encrusted house.

Happier story!  One of my college buddies worked in a Scamp's pet store in a mall for a while, where they sold puppies and kittens.  There was this one kitten there, a little calico, who obviously wasn't doing well; she was sick for a couple weeks, I think, and the management couldn't be arsed to do anything about it.  My friend asked what would happen to the kitten if it didn't sell (which it almost certainly wouldn't, being as sick as it was): it would be euthanized.  Somehow my friend managed to talk the store into just giving her the kitten, probably on the grounds that this was a less expensive option than having it killed, and she took the thing home and nursed it back to health.  This was about ten or twelve years ago, and that cat is now a fat, sassy bitch lording it over the other animals (and kids) at my friend's house.  She named her Brooklyn, on the grounds that she'd had a rough start in life so she would need a tough, strong name to survive.


----------



## sea panther (Sep 29, 2015)

fishercat said:


> So there's this lovely little pet store near where I live. It's really small, and the pet housing is slightly lackluster, but they take good care of their animals with what they have and they even give out little booklets with each animal that tells the new owners the basics. Because of this reputation, people will often bring animals in for them to sell.
> 
> Apparently one lady was driving along the highway, and she noticed a large bag on the side of the road. For some reason she decided to pull over and investigate the bag, and inside she found seven squirming baby rats. This was in the middle of January. So she rushed the poor things to the pet store instead of a vet. The store owner took one look at the dying rats, thanked the woman for finding them, and immediately sent someone to take them to a vet.
> 
> ...


Honestly, probably to avoid having to pay the vet.

I did a 4 year stint at Petsmart - mostly as a groomer, but I was on the floor for a bit too. SO many people would bring in their sick pets trying to pawn them off or try to get free advice (and get mad when that advice was "take it to a vet"). Some guy brought in a tiny 3 week old puppy that he found wondering what to do with it, instead of taking it to, y'know, a shelter or a vet. One of my coworkers actually took the pup home and nursed her, then wound up keeping her. But most of those stories didn't have happy endings. People would bring in their ancient cats that were very obviously at the end of their life, trying to give them away instead of spending the money to have them put to sleep with the excuse, "they keep pooping on my rug." It was really awful.


----------



## Lunete (Sep 29, 2015)

My sister's cat had four kittens. At just a few days old one suffered a fatal wound to the abdomen. We thought our pit bull was to blame, so we put away her toys as punishment and banned her from my sister's room (where the kittens were). The next night sis went into her room to get something and walked in on her cat biting one of the kittens to death. 
Bob Barker told you to spay and neuter for a reason guys.


----------



## Shadow Fox (Sep 30, 2015)

Lunete said:


> My sister's cat had four kittens. At just a few days old one suffered a fatal wound to the abdomen. We thought our pit bull was to blame, so we put away her toys as punishment and banned her from my sister's room (where the kittens were). The next night sis went into her room to get something and walked in on her cat biting one of the kittens to death.
> Bob Barker told you to spay and neuter for a reason guys.


One of my coworkers had (or took in from someone else, I can't remember the details) a mother cat who'd suffered a lot of trauma growing up. When she had her litter, she more or less went crazy and murdered _and ate _all but one of the kittens.  Coworker only found her in time to save the one, but I believe that one was raised by hand and eventually adopted out, and psycho mama cat was promptly spayed.


----------



## AnimuGinger (Sep 30, 2015)

I had two mice. They came from the same litter. Two females, cute as can be.

Sure, it seemed like they might have issues with who was the head mouse bitch in the cage, but I didn't realize mice were total shitlords.

I now have one mouse. The other was murdered in her sleep. Shit was nasty.


----------



## Kenneth Erwin Engelhardt (Sep 30, 2015)

Jackass RN said:


> I had two mice. They came from the same litter. Two females, cute as can be.
> 
> Sure, it seemed like they might have issues with who was the head mouse bitch in the cage, but I didn't realize mice were total shitlords.
> 
> I now have one mouse. The other was murdered in her sleep. Shit was nasty.


 Mice have no mercy when they go at it.


----------



## For The Internet (Sep 30, 2015)

Bugaboo said:


> I don't agree with keeping bettas in bowls but some people I know have done it successfully and have had healthy, long lived bettas (8 years plus) and the whole aquarium society is like "yeah that's fine" so little old me has no place to argue.
> Of course these are the same people who have like, 12+ bettas so maybe they need to tone it down a lil'
> Personally I have a 10 gallon and some equipment set aside for a betta
> 
> ...




I have to agree that bettas can live in bowls as long as a) they have a good surface area, b) they're heated consistently (preferably by an appropriate mini heater with a thermometer to watch for overheating) and c) the water is tested daily. If the bowl is cycled (difficult but possible) it should take care of most of the nitrates so you'd only have to replace a little bit of water. Otherwise, you need to do 80-100% changes and that's pretty stressful and prevents a good colony of bacteria getting established.
It's definitely not ideal, but bettas are labyrinth fish who can survive in tiny mud puddles in thailand in the wild as long as there's plenty of surface area for them to gather oxygen. I had a betta who lived in a pretty small tank (about 2.5 g) and he lived to be 7. I didn't know as much about bettas then as I do now, but I knew enough to cycle the tank and provide plants to rest on and feed him live foods a few times a week along with his pellets.

It's so sad to think of how many fish die every day because people don't know shit about cycling.

People are crazy if they think feeding live rodents to spiders or snakes is a good idea. I have scars on my hands and arms that show what a rat's teeth can do - and that was from _playing_.

When my most recent rat was a baby I'd play wrestle with him - flip him over on his back and tickle his tummy and let him do the same to my hand - and he'd grab me with his teeth. He didn't understand I didn't have a layer of loose skin and fur like a rat does, so when he got really excited he'd wind up nipping me in an attempt to grab me. I knew I should stop because the behaviour would only get worse as he got older and bigger, but he loved playing that game so much that I went against my better judgement and continued it. He never meant to hurt me and I never got upset with him for doing so, but I have scars that would surprise people to realise come from a rat because they're so big.

This is one of the scars he gave me, and it's been about 18 months since I got it. You can sort of gauge the size by comparing it to my wrist. Again, this bite came from playful behaviour with a rat who was excited and happy as opposed to angry or scared or in pain. If he could do that accidentally, you can imagine what they're capable of if they're actively attacking something.



Spoiler: Bite scar












And the wound when it first happened (took a picture to ask a friend if they thought I should get stitches). You can't really see how deep it went from this angle, but it gives you an idea of what it was like.



Spoiler: Warning: blood, deep bite











I'm showing these pictures in case someone here happens to be reading and feeds their reptiles live rodents. It is a bad idea and you don't want your guys to be hurt like this.


A fully grown rat could do massive damage to any reptile that tries to kill it, and if a person loves their reptiles they should know enough to protect them. Even a mouse could do significant damage. Rodents have such powerful cheek muscles and their teeth are extremely sharp. It also hopefully means the rats or mice were killed humanely, rather than having to go through the pain and terror of being slowly killed by a predator.


This post is way too long, but I just had to say I've taken care of beardies at the nature ed center and they are amazing little guys. Really gentle lizards. I bonded with them removing mites from their mouths and eyes and ears and I've always wanted one as a pet since then.




Shadow Fox said:


> One of my coworkers had (or took in from someone else, I can't remember the details) a mother cat who'd suffered a lot of trauma growing up. When she had her litter, she more or less went crazy and murdered _and ate _all but one of the kittens.  Coworker only found her in time to save the one, but I believe that one was raised by hand and eventually adopted out, and psycho mama cat was promptly spayed.



It's possible there was something wrong with the kittens your coworker didn't know about and that's why the mother cat killed and ate them. In the wild mother animals will often kill their babies if they sense they're sick or weak and then eat them so the carcasses don't attract unwanted attention. Traumatised animals can just be bad parents, though.


----------



## Rin (Sep 30, 2015)

I used to volunteer at the animal shelter, back before I lived somewhere I could actually adopt a cat.  Probably the worst behavior I saw was from a bunch of high school girls who were also volunteering.  There was one cat that was obviously scared; it was hiding in a box in its crate, and would hiss at anyone who put a hand near it.  So of course, they kept poking at it, making it hiss and growl at them, and then talked about how mean it was and how it would totally have to be put to sleep.  Apparently that wasn't enough; one of them had to get out her phone and_ play a fucking video of an angry cat_.  Pretty much all the cats in the area started freaking out.  And all this was in front of people who were potentially looking to adopt.  I told them off after the people left, though it didn't really make much impact.

There were also a few instances where I narrowly avoided going off at people who wanted to get their cats declawed.  I just cannot deal with people who openly state that the state of their furniture is more important than not mutilating an innocent animal.


----------



## Jomadre (Sep 30, 2015)

Bugaboo said:


> Speaking of cutting of things that shouldn't be cut off, I want to punch people right in the nuts who de-fang their tarantulas. Because of the nature of the spider's digestive system it can only eat liquid so when it catches it's prey it injects venom from it's fangs to liquify the insides and then it drinks them, with the fangs gone the animal physically cannot eat. If you can't accept that if you own tarantulas, sooner or later you will be bitten, perhaps a tarantula is not the right animal for you. Some pet stores do this to the tarantulas they sell and it just boggles the mind.



Don't they know that their fangs will be back after their next molt?  And how would you go about doing that in the first place?  A quick google search didn't find any procedure or anything about defanging tarantulas, only dumbasses that work in pet stores will tell people that and plebs believe them.  I tell pet store employees to stop saying that when I am told that.


----------



## Trapped_Fairy (Sep 30, 2015)

As a total dog person, I've gotta preach to you all the importance of getting your puppies fucking vaccinated by a vet. It's like the biggest puppy pet peeve I have for a very good reason. 

My little one,Lily, a now six year old tricolor Chihuahua, came from a neglectful home. Her old owners got her for their three year old daughter (which is a terrible environment for Chihuahuas btw) and when she proved too energetic for their kid, they decided the best place for her was to fucking just live outside 24/7. She was so lonely and desperate for attention that she would break out of her yard and find the neighbors just to be noticed. That's how my mom's boss found out about her and asked the owners if they were looking for a home for her, which ended in my mom deciding to take her in the day we heard about her situation. At eight that same night, we met with the then owners at the local dollar general and they handed her off to us like she meant nothing to them, no goodbyes or we'll miss yous. I will never forget the way her nails dug into my sweater the first time I held her. She was terrified to let go. We bonded almost instantly and over the next few weeks between the interactions with our other dogs and all the spoiling she got, she was already an inseparable part of our family. 

Though a little over a month after we got her, I noticed she was acting strange. She's normally a ball of energy who loves to play outside and get into everything, yet for some reason she was just moping around and sleeping literally all day. She looked like she felt miserable. My gut told me there was something seriously wrong here, so I had her taken to the vet that same day. I am so thankful I did. We managed to catch her parvo in an early enough stage that she still stood a chance.  My family didn't have the kind of money to keep her at the vet, who at that point just recommended we put her down.  That just wasn't an option for us. I pleaded with him for any other option and he gave us one hope. We were given antibiotics for her and strict instructions on care for the next week or so. 

I spent the next few weeks sleeping in our basement with her, nursing her back to health. I was the only person who could even get her to take her medicine or drink, so I pretty much refused to leave her for very long. Thankfully, my baby girl recovered and is healthy as a horse today. 

Later I'd asked her vet, which we'd changed after the other one suggested putting her down, how she'd gotten it since we were told she'd been vaccinated by her old owners. According to the vet, Lily was probably given improper vaccinations from a feedstore, which was a common practice in our rural area at the time.

Moral of the story: Get your dogs vaccinated by a vet for fucks sake.


----------



## yummy hand sanitizer (Sep 30, 2015)

Really grinds my gears when people try to raise cats (or dogs, but especially cats) on a vegan diet.

Just... no. If you really need a pet that will fit in your vegan lifestyle, get a rabbit or something. Y'know, something that doesn't NEED meat to survive.


----------



## MysticMisty (Oct 1, 2015)

This is something that I actually feel guilty about in retrospect because I was completely naive about pets that aren't cats or dogs at the time. This was the first time I ever knew someone whose pets weren't cats or dogs, let alone fairly exotic ones. By the time I realized what was going on I hadn't talked to this person in years and so I don't even know if he still lives in this city.

So, this guy, S. We shared a few classes our 8th grade year in middle school. He was kind of dumb and a bit of a dick to me at times with a huge ego, but I put up with him because I was relatively new to the area then and didn't have any friends at the time. Neither did S really for that matter, probably because he was an egotistical dick to people. I felt kind of sorry for him, which is probably why I put up with S for as long as I did (about a year and a half).

When I first met S he had five pets at the time, a cat I never saw, a golden retriever that I think was technically his parents, two lizards (not bearded dragons, but beyond that I don't know species they were) and a huge red parrot. It might have been a scarlet macaw, but I'm not sure.

The dog and (I assume) cat were well cared for as far as I could tell, even if S always ignored both of them. The other three is a different story however. Although the lizard habitat had fairly clean glass as I remembered it, some sand, and a large hollowed out rock to hide in, it wasn't an especially big habitat (the rock took up most of the space). I actually commented when I first saw them/their habitat that it seemed quite small for two. S sniffed and told me I didn't know jack shit because it was twice as big as what was recommended. The lizards were 6-8 inches long from nose to tail while their habitat was 18 inches long and like I said, most of it was the rock. Their diet solely consisted of pinkies and S never handled them. But at least S kept them in his room.

The parrot, on the other hand, was isolated 24/7 out in the garage, in the dark. It's cage was roughly 3 x 3 x 5 and maybe had two or three perches and perhaps a toy or two. I only saw it once, when S took me there to brag he had a parrot...only to immediately talk about how the bird was mean as fuck and he hated it. It screeched all hours of the day and night, but they always ignored it except to shove water and food in the cage. S claimed they used to have a cockatiel as well, but it either died or escaped and then died nearby, I can't remember which.

Not long after I met S his older sister gave him a pet parakeet. She had actually gotten it as a pet for her (extremely bratty) three year old, who almost immediately became bored with it and his sister didn't want it if her kid didn't. S quickly got a second one to go with it, and just like the lizards and big parrot, promptly ignored them except to shove them food and water. S actually got pissed at me on more than one occasion because I wanted to handle and play with the birds.

S briefly had a betta. He only had it for about three months (if that) before it died and S admitted he didn't really care about it anyways.

S eventually got a snake, was 18 inches long in a two feet long habitat. Much like the lizards S never handled it. S decided to start breeding mice to cut down on costs, so he bought a shitload of mice to go with it. The snake was fed still-living mice, which S was quite eager to demonstrate all the time. He had something like 10 or 15 mice in one small cage, but I'm not too sure. He kept the mouse cage in a closet and I only ever got brief glimpses of it when he fed the snake.

I genuinely feel bad that I didn't know he was caring poorly for his pets at the time. I don't know what, if anything, I could have done though. It seemed like S got any pet he felt like given that parrots cost thousands of dollars and S was all too eager to show me the receipt for the lizards to brag about how they cost $50 each. Honestly, I think S only wanted these pets just so he flaunt his family's upper-middle class wealth.


----------



## Bugaboo (Oct 1, 2015)

I'm thinking the lizards could have been young water dragons which look like this





I'm thinking that because it couldn't have been a leopard gecko because they are too small or God forbid they could have been baby iguanas.
Anyway, water dragons grow up to be too large to house in most commercial tanks so you basically have to custom build them a house but unlike iguanas they're not evil and don't get so big you have to dedicate a whole room of your house to them so they're far more ideal pets.
I'm very, very agaisnt the idea of a kid under 16-18 being the sole caretaker of a pet rather than like, a dog because you just walk it, feed it, love it and clean it's poop and it's pretty good. Animals like lizards, fish and birds really should have an adult be the primary caretaker and then as the child gets older transition them to be more involved with the tasks needed to care for the pet like, playing with a bird, cleaning up lizard dumps, feeding the fish and changing the water.


----------



## MysticMisty (Oct 1, 2015)

Bugaboo said:


> I'm thinking the lizards could have been young water dragons which look like this
> 
> 
> 
> ...


It definitely wasn't that, unless their coloration varies. I distinctly remember they were brown.

Honestly I wouldn't even trust S with a dog. He wouldn't beat it (I hope) or forget to feed and water it, but he wouldn't pet or play with it ever either. He's definitely the type though to drop a few thousand dollars on the currently popular breed just to brag about it.


----------



## Ido (Oct 1, 2015)

MysticMisty said:


> It definitely wasn't that, unless their coloration varies. I distinctly remember they were brown.
> 
> Honestly I wouldn't even trust S with a dog. He wouldn't beat it (I hope) or forget to feed and water it, but he wouldn't pet or play with it ever either. He's definitely the type though to drop a few thousand dollars on the currently popular breed just to brag about it.



Here's a chart with some lizards, maybe you'll see the one S had? 


Spoiler


----------



## Pinkamena Diane Pie (Oct 2, 2015)

Well, I don't know this EXACTLY considering I was there for around 30 minutes only before I left, but when I first got my puppies,they lived in hell. I don't know the details exactly, but basically it was survival of the fittest at their home. The home was in a country setting, no asphalt leading there. We had to hunt to find it. Dogs were EVERYWHERE. A white German Shephard and a Mastiff came at our car. The owners stopped them and, quite literally dragged each dog out. Considering the fact that the collars, we discovered, were extremely tight (not enough to cut through skin, but choker level tight. My dad had to cut their collar off. Now, he claims it was because he couldn't take him off but I know better. 

Then again, he just thinks that my dog yokes himself because he is a dumbass. (He will do that to himself because he is a dumbass)But at the time, it wasn't like that. The home had a whole bunch of junk. So much I saw a lab puppy climbing the mountain. When we got home it was hell. They weren't trained correctly, they were terrified of everything and anything (or at least, scared of getting yelled at) and they fought eachother. The inside dog was much calmer but scared. He would let me touch him if he ate, but he was a pushover and would getting attacked. He wasn't used to survival of the fittest. Meanwhile the outside dog was very territorial and just kept growling and snarling at the indoor one. 

If you ignored all that, you couldn't ignore their health. They were flea ridden, had worms, malnutitioned (They gained weight when they came with me and my family. They are now a bit over weight), they were underweight and their coats dull. They were 6 months. They didn't have fluffy coats like they have today. In fact, my dad washed the flees (or a portion of them) and they began to shine again. They had no vaccines and no one to care for them before we got them because of what my dog has. My dog suffers from chronic lyme disease. He gets leg tremors, spasms, etc. His teeth grind together whenever he's in pain. He wouldn't be in pain if they gave him the lyme vaccine. (We gave it to him, but it was too late. We vaccinated him in January of 2014, just days after we got him.) It takes a tick 3 days for it to infect a dog. They just didn't wash him or help him. 
TL DR: I witness my first puppy mill. Oh grand.


----------



## HypeBeast (Oct 2, 2015)

This thread is depressing as fuck. ): I need to go hug my cat now.


----------



## Red (Oct 2, 2015)

MysticMisty said:


> some sand,


IMMEDIATE NOPE
Never keep reptiles on sand. Seriously. It will impact them and kill them. I don't care who says that beardies and leos are from the desert-- they live on rocks and dried dirt. Living on sand will kill any herp that isn't designed specifically to live on it. As soon as I saw the word "sand" I knew this kid was killing his animals.

also pff, 50 dollar lizards? go to a real reptile expo and check out the half-million dollar ball python morphs. fucking pleb


----------



## Magpie (Oct 2, 2015)

An asshole ex-friend of mine's mom was a bird hoarder.  She had cockatiels, parakeets, lovebirds, budgies, and a massive cockatoo, and that's just what I saw at a first glance.  They were all in tiny cages in a very small room, isolated from people in the house.  None of it was clean so being in that house was hell on the lungs.  They were poorly socialized, of course, and it was really just heartbreaking in general.  I really regret not reporting her before I left the States, because those birds deserve so much better than a few minutes of human contact a day and being told to shut up when they make noise.

This woman also had a massively obese cat who must have weighed something like 30 pounds (unable to clean or really do anything for himself) with a nasty temper to boot.  A vet offered to put him down at no cost because he was in that bad of shape. She felt putting a suffering animal with an abysmal quality of life down was "playing God."  Her alternative? The bitch put him outside, in the dead of Florida summer, and ignored him when he came crying at the door to be let back in. No food or water out there either. I guarantee you he died within a week. I was pissed.

My dog back home was also kind of a rescue in a way.  Some shitty backyard breeder was churning out puppies for a quick buck. The mother was absolutely emaciated, and the ""breeder"" tried to pass it off as her being thin because of nursing the puppies. Total and utter bullshit - there is no excuse at all for an animal to be nothing but skin and bone.  I could see the poor girl's ribs and hipbones from across the room.  It was dark so I couldn't see the street name or house number, but good god if I did the ASPCA would have been up his ass in seconds.

If there is one thing I hate in this world more than anything it's people who mistreat animals, honestly.


----------



## sm0t (Oct 3, 2015)

One of the main reasons why I quit my old job at Petco is because the amount of stupidity I dealt with on a near-daily basis probably would have eventually caused me to get physically violent.

A woman once asked me if we sold any "unsafe" cat collars.  Yes those were her actual words.  She was looking for one without the safety breakaway because she didn't want to have to keep replacing them.  And of course the cat was an outdoor cat.

I really wish that the myths surrounding goldfish would just die already.  I've lost count how many times I had to spell out in the simplest terms possible why you can't keep goldfish in a bowl (or a betta, or a pleco, or a single neon tetra at one point...), and people still don't wrap their head around it.  Our doormat of a manager usually ended up ringing up the goldfish and bowl setup for the over-entitled dumbasses anyway, after gratuitous amounts of bitching and moaning from the customer about how they don't want to drop the money needed for the actual tank and filter setup that is needed for a goldfish to survive as well as go through the nitrogen cycle.  Goldfish grow huge (8+ inches) despite the myth that they won't grow larger than their tank, and they produce a lot of waste.  Hence why they often just end up getting flushed down the toilet a week later. 

That same manager would also live feed any mice from our stock that are injured or tended to pick fights with its cagemates to the red tail boas and ball pythons we sold, despite the employee handbook clearly printing out that this is against company policy; she claimed to have gotten permission from our DM.

A woman asked me why her "turtle" (which was actually a tortoise judging by the what little of the enclosure she described) wasn't "walking around so much."  I asked her the basics like what sort of lights she was using and what was she feeding.  Her answer was "A lamp" for lighting, and "Lettuce, that's all" for food.  When I asked what kind of lamp, she just said "Just a lamp."  When I asked what kind of lettuce, she looks at me like I grew a second head.  "The one you get from the store!" was her answer.

"But ma'am, the store has lots of kinds of lettuce," I said, seeking clarification.

"The one you get from the store!" she parroted.

I asked in a different way, "Is it round and light green?"

"Yes!"

Yes, she was feeding her tortoise nothing but iceberg lettuce (water in leaf form) and using what I guessed was a basic incandescent bulb, and had no idea why it wasn't "walking around so much."


----------



## Jomadre (Oct 3, 2015)

sm0t said:


> Goldfish grow huge (8+ inches) despite the myth that they won't grow larger than their tank, and they produce a lot of waste.  Hence why they often just end up getting flushed down the toilet a week later.



I have worked at jobs where I sold fish.  I got yelled at by one of the managers by telling people "Well, technically fish stop growing based on the size of the tank because once they get too big for their tanks they die".  Talked dozens of people out of buying fish.  I feel like that was a good thing, my manager disagreed.


----------



## CrispyBacon (Oct 3, 2015)

Elijah said:


> and pet store should refuse sale to anyone who doesn't have sufficient supplies or knowledge to care for animals.


Unfortunately, pet stores also tend not to have any idea what the best care is for an exotic animal, and house them improperly before providing inappropriate supplies and potentially harmful advice to new owners. It's a sad cycle for these animals.


----------



## Elijah (Oct 3, 2015)

CrispyBacon said:


> Unfortunately, pet stores also tend not to have any idea what the best care is for an exotic animal, and house them improperly before providing inappropriate supplies and potentially harmful advice to new owners. It's a sad cycle for these animals.



Then I believe pet stores need a major overhaul. Only people actually knowledgeable on the animals they carry can sell them, and they must be gotten from reputable breeders. Great care needs to be taken in ensuring every animal goes to a good, knowledgeable home, and not to a 5 year old having worn him mom down on buying a fish or a hamster that's going to be flushed down the toilet/neglected to death in a week. There seriously needs to be an animal offender's registry.


----------



## Red (Oct 3, 2015)

Elijah said:


> Then I believe pet stores need a major overhaul. Only people actually knowledgeable on the animals they carry can sell them, and they must be gotten from reputable breeders. Great care needs to be taken in ensuring every animal goes to a good, knowledgeable home, and not to a 5 year old having worn him mom down on buying a fish or a hamster that's going to be flushed down the toilet/neglected to death in a week. There seriously needs to be an animal offender's registry.


I don't know of a single pet store that gets their animals from a decent breeder. I've bought all my exotics directly from breeders and I won't ever change that. A best friend of mine worked at PetSmart as a petcare manager for many years and she has horror stories about the states of the animals that come in. And while PetSmart employees are technically allowed to refuse sales, they'll get chewed out by management and/or fired for it if they do it. 
PetSmart and PetCo both use the same supplier: Rainbow Exotics, which is known for being a horrible animal mill. But there really aren't laws in place for animals that aren't dogs or cats. I've seen snakes that have horrible burns, open wounds from live rats, stuck shed and severe dehydration that are on the verge of death and there's literally nothing you can do. The laws protecting conventional pets are loose enough as is, exotics have almost nothing.


----------



## For The Internet (Oct 4, 2015)

My Corella came from a bird hoarder. He was her favourite but he was treated in a way that's terrible for birds. There were 40-50 birds in the woman's small house and I was one of the volunteers helping to relocate the birds. One of my friends (who is a breeder) was taking in some of the birds and one of them was my little guy, who was 6 and on his 3rd home at the time.

He was kept in a dark room where the windows were covered up by hoard stuff so he couldn't look out or get fresh air or sunlight. He was allowed out of the cage, but from what I can tell he was allowed to do incredibly inappropriate things. She would let him eat on the dinner table right from her plate. While it's a good idea to bring out your birds so they can eat at the same time you do, you need to feed them appropriate food and have them on a perch or in a cage so they can't come to the table. Judging by the way Stan flips out at the scent of canned spaghetti, I'm certain it was a big part of his diet. He also used to ask me all the time if he could have some ice cream, or he'd ask me for a cigarette. She was a heavy smoker, which is a death sentence for birds.

He had fatty liver disease when I got him and he was morbidly obese. He had to take meds for over a year to get everything under control.

He also had a lot of behavior problems, because his owner would let him masturbate on her hand and so he saw hands as both rivals and potential mates and acted accordingly. To this day he'll attack hands if you're not paying close enough attention because he's angry and frustrated that he can't use them for relief any more.

He's a great bird, he has a massive personality and he talks and sings and dances and just soaks up love and attention like a sponge. I actually wound up keeping him because I offered to have him stay with me for a few days while my friend made room for him, and when I handed him over to my friend he wouldn't eat or drink and would just sit huddled at the bottom of the cage. I don't know why he bonded to me so strongly, but I wound up really having no choice but to take him since he would only eat and drink if he was with me.


----------



## Android raptor (Oct 4, 2015)

Being a reptile/exotics person I've encountered my fait share of horrors (because it seems they're particularly at risk for maltreatment).

Other than the usual pet store bullshit, I know many rescued animals, including a boa who was burned so badly by hot rocks he still has issues (just had another surgery a couple months ago actually), a ball python who survived a hoarding situation and has some scarring from being given live feeders (he also is afraid of anything that resembles a live rodent), a beardie who had goddamn cigarettes put out on her, and more.

I actually reported a local pet store and took pics of some of the terrible conditions a couple months ago. I'm not sure what happened about the report, though I've heard the store is on its way out so it sounds like they've got some heat on them. I also know an ex-Petland employee who basically said all the horror stories about petland are true (and employees even have to sign a waver that they won't tell the truth to others lest they be fired).

One issue that really rustles my jimmies is venomoid snakes. Basically, venomous snakes with their fangs/venom glands/etc removed. Not only can that shit grow back, its also a horrendously invasive procedure that's often done in unsanitary conditions without proper anesthesia. I'be heard most venomoid snakes die within a year, many due to stress alone.

I think the most disturbing venomoid horrors I've heard about were green mambas who where forced to bit down on cloth that was then ripped out in a crude defanging attempt. They had horrendous injuries like broken jaws and what not, and were in so much pain they required a ridiculous amount of pain medicine to get them to settle down. I don't know how many, if any eventually recovered. I also saw a pic someone took at a show of this beautiful white cobra just thrown in the trash, apparently a venomoid snake who died from stress.

And while its not really a pet thing, there's also rattlesnake roundups, which are mind boggling levels of horrible.

EDIT: there's also the people out there who are essentially ball python millers, who breed snakes even if they're unhealthy or deformed because they just care about making as many snakes as possible. And people who starve large constrictors in an attempt the make them smaller (which works because the snakes are malnourished). Also heard about a guy who brought a pygmy rattlesnake to an event who was striking the glass (something that they can get seriously injured or killed from, and also a blatant sign the snake is stressed and afraid and needs some quite time) that he did nothing about, even being entertained by it and showing it off to the crowd. 

God, I know way to many horror stories


----------



## Tokitae (Oct 4, 2015)

I'm a huge cat person and have owned them all my life, and so friends and family often come to me with questions about their cat's behaviour. Most notably, I have a friend whose cat was a rescue (she used to be used for animal testing) and has what can only be described as some sort of eating disorder. The second you put her food down, she eats _all of it_ as quickly as she can. Rather than, I don't know, feeding her in smaller amounts so she spreads out her meals a little, my friend's family just feeds her more because "she's hungry". They do this even when the poor cat eats so fast that she has to throw up right afterwards because her stomach is full.
As you can imagine she's had a _lot _of health issues through the years (which the family seems so surprised about!). At one point I discovered their vet apparently had _never_ advised them to change her eating habits and just kept talking about different prescription foods to try (so they could overfeed her with those too). I told my friend she should consider seeing another vet. She did, and he recommended the obvious; less food per day, no treats or human food, etc.
This was going pretty well for a while until I find out that apparently, friend's mum just can't resist giving the cat more food when she begs and dad is starting to cave as well. My friend wants to help but has trouble contradicting her parents (she's autistic, to some degree, and still lives at home). I ended up being so frustrated that I bluntly told her what I know the vet has already told her; that the cat _will_ die if she doesn't feed her properly, and she needs to put her foot down with her parents if she wants her to be healthy.
It's really frustrating to me how some people just don't seem to understand that most domestic animals don't really have impulse control when it comes to food. They don't perceive time like we do, so if you put down food they don't know if it's going to be there for the next week or the next few seconds. In the wild most of them don't really have any way to store their food or "save it for later"; they just eat when food is there. But if you create habits for them, like feeding a cat two brimming bowls a day of biscuits plus wet food, treats and table scraps, then hell yeah that cat is going to complain when you start cutting back. It's learned that it "needs" that much food a day because _that's how much you used to feed it_. That doesn't mean it's really hungry. It's just confused because your dumb ass wasn't taking care of it properly.
I used to try and help these people with their cat, but god, I just can't deal with it sometimes. The same family won't even buy the cat a scratching post for indoors because it "looks ugly" but then complains when she scratches their leather couches. I mostly learned from this that you can't help people who don't want to be helped. No matter how much advice I give them, they always end up coming back to me saying, "well, I did the exact opposite of what you said, and it didn't work! Obviously you must have been wrong!" Ugh. :/


----------



## Zazie (Oct 4, 2015)

A family we know recently got a dog (a standard poodle, IIRC). They named it after my brother who passed away recently, since their son was a good friend of his (which is fine, and yes -- it relates to the story).

Apparently the dog isn't trained at all. It doesn't know commands and they let it walk all over the furniture, despite it being pretty big already.  My mum's visited them and the dog a few times, and she says they talk to it in the same voices they use to talk to other humans in. The dog might be smart, but they're not _that_ smart. I always thought that you're meant to talk to most animals in a higher-pitched voice so that they know they're being talked to -- even if they're intelligent animals. I mean, if a dog's got a shoe in its mouth it's not going to understand you if you say "drop" in a normal voice if it hasn't had any training...

They tried taking the dog to puppy training but apparently it was "too hard" or some bullshit. Wow, having an animal and raising it from a baby requires effort! Who would've thought? (Not them, clearly.)



Spoiler: Slightly off-topic I guess?



Normally I wouldn't care, but they went out of their way to name the dog after my brother. I want to tell them to at least try to put some effort in, but I know I'd get too worked up about it. I've been so annoyed by it that I had a dream I was insulting them. If only... 

I haven't gone to visit them myself since a) I don't really like the family much and b) I'm not good with dogs. Maybe once they actually start giving a shit about the dog I'll reconsider.



I know this isn't as bad as some of the other stuff in this thread, but I'm worried it is going to turn into neglect. To me, at least, not training an animal properly is a form of neglect, or something along those lines anyway.


----------



## toulouse (Oct 5, 2015)

I sold two fancy goldfish and a .5 gallon bowl to a man today. I flat out told him they'd die in that bowl. He shrugged and bought it anyway. I wept internally.


----------



## Madolche (Oct 5, 2015)

Reptiles are so easy to be abused or neglected, especially because of how god damn easy it is to just go into petco and walk out with a ball python or a leopard gecko. Many teens do not realize that Balls can live almost 3 decades, yet they are merely treated as accessory pets to show off to their friends how 'sick and cool' it is to watch them struggle against live prey. The dangers of feeding live...it makes my stomach boil. 

My BF's brother had a leopard gecko that was only fed once a month because the parents said they heard it was ok from the pet store guy. They had her on impactful sand and no heat lamp. Thing was emaciated and as big as my thumb for a 6 year old gecko. I'm talking almost no fat on her tail and was always bone cold. Dead crickets and shit littered her tank and it was rarely cleaned. No matter what I told them they refused to feed her more often, citing there was no time for them to go out and get food! Why even get the poor girl if you can't devote proper care? Surprised she even lived for that long.

Pet stores really do contribute to this. I always get very upset when I see colored sand and aquariums for species that need high humidity. Or when people perpetuate the myth that snakes need a different box to feed in, otherwise they will bite your hand if you try to hold them. My snakes in my rack system say otherwise...

I have over a dozen reptiles, a lot of which are advanced species, and I've worked at a reputable reptile shop last year and the amount of people I had to talk out of getting large monitors was astounding. The reptile hobby has become saturated with people who do little research and want an exotic pet. I have 12 years of reptile experience and a lot of that was in my teens, learning with family friends that were long time breeders and even I don't feel like I know everything I need to know. I was that kid that really got her passion from Steve Irwin and wanted to be a herpetologist when I grew up.  I have devoted myself to being a herpetoculturist just out of the sheer love I have for my reptiles.

Typical day in the shop used to have questions like: "I have a leopard gecko, so I think I can handle this tegu". No, no you can not. My tegu has an 8 x 4 x 4 enclosure built by myself. Do you even have the space for that? Or the time to devote to taming your animal? Didn't matter, a lot of monitors still got sold.

"I'm looking for a beginner snake for my 8 year old, I think I'll get this Nicaraguan boa, he's cool.":////// Why not this kenyan sand boa? "He needs something way cooler." Ok, let's disregard that N boas can be very mouthy.

I always feel...kind of condescending when talking to people about reptiles because they are pets that don't get defended as much as other mammals and I really don't want to sound like a know it all. But I'm just so tired of seeing people on my FB or Insta feed getting baby ball pythons and using the little snake emoji when they have had no experience keeping other reptiles; and many of these folk are heavy weed smokers, which is extremely detrimental to a sake's respiratory system.


----------



## LazarusOwenhart (Oct 5, 2015)

I'm gonna add a happy story just because we all need one right now. My old neighbour had a huge and very well kept aviary in her garden full of rescued birds and she took incredibly good care of them. She used to sit in it on summer evenings and hand feed them and they'd flock all over her and generally seemed happy and healthy. The aviary was massive and had a number of roosting sheds and nest boxes. It was built over two small live trees and had a shallow pond and some dust wallows and all sorts of good bird stuff. The only bad thing was the half hour of thunderous noise every morning at sunrise which sounded like somebody tearing sheet steel interspersed with the occasional ear splitting scream of the two peacocks she kept loose in her garden.


----------



## Jomadre (Oct 5, 2015)

Madolche said:


> I have over a dozen reptiles, a lot of which are advanced species, and I've worked at a reputable reptile shop last year and the amount of people I had to talk out of getting large monitors was astounding.



I had a guy at a pet store try very hard to sell me a Nile Monitor as an impulse buy because it was on sale and the manager wanted it out of the store.  He seemed offended when I told him that carnivorous lizards that will one day grow to be almost as big as I am make poor impulse buys.


----------



## For The Internet (Oct 5, 2015)

Zazie said:


> A family we know recently got a dog (a standard poodle, IIRC). They named it after my brother who passed away recently, since their son was a good friend of his (which is fine, and yes -- it relates to the story).
> 
> Apparently the dog isn't trained at all. It doesn't know commands and they let it walk all over the furniture, despite it being pretty big already.  My mum's visited them and the dog a few times, and she says they talk to it in the same voices they use to talk to other humans in. The dog might be smart, but they're not _that_ smart. I always thought that you're meant to talk to most animals in a higher-pitched voice so that they know they're being talked to -- even if they're intelligent animals. I mean, if a dog's got a shoe in its mouth it's not going to understand you if you say "drop" in a normal voice if it hasn't had any training...
> 
> ...




I'm sorry to hear about your brother. I do have something info about dog training that might help you feel a bit better about the situation with the poodle, though.

For one thing, poodles are one of the easiest to train breeds of dog out there because they are super intelligent. They rule the obedience circuit and are very quick learners. If the dog is young it will probably settle down a bit on its own in time.

Also, you don't actually need to use a different voice/inflection for a dog to understand you're talking to it. Just saying its name is enough for it to realise you're directing your speech at them. Dogs read your tone somewhat, as opposed to volume or pitch, but that's not really how they understand you. Mostly, they read your body language. It's actually not desirable to use a high pitched tone when talking to a dog (tends to over excite them), or a loud voice when they misbehave. You just need to be firm with your voice and body language for the dog to get across when it has misbehaved. They can tell by your body language if you're pleased or unhappy with them, and when you're relaxed or upset.

Often the best way to deal with an overexcited dog is to kind of ignore it. Like, if it's doing something objectionable like jumping up on you for your attention, the most effective way to get them to stop is to stand up straight, walk straight past them and not give them any attention. Then, when they've stopped trying to jump and they're sitting or lying by you and exhibiting acceptable behaviour you can acknowledge them. That honestly works really well. To this day the only person who my aunt and uncle's dogs won't jump on is me, because I did exactly that from the start and they realised from my body language that they weren't going to get anywhere with that behaviour. When they sit I talk to them and pat them and tell them they're good dogs.

I understand it must be hard to see them be seemingly apathetic about the dog they named after your late brother, but they definitely haven't irreparably screwed the dog up.


----------



## Bugaboo (Oct 5, 2015)

Madolche said:


> Reptiles are so easy to be abused or neglected, especially because of how god damn easy it is to just go into petco and walk out with a ball python or a leopard gecko. Many teens do not realize that Balls can live almost 3 decades, yet they are merely treated as accessory pets to show off to their friends how 'sick and cool' it is to watch them struggle against live prey. The dangers of feeding live...it makes my stomach boil.
> 
> My BF's brother had a leopard gecko that was only fed once a month because the parents said they heard it was ok from the pet store guy. They had her on impactful sand and no heat lamp. Thing was emaciated and as big as my thumb for a 6 year old gecko. I'm talking almost no fat on her tail and was always bone cold. Dead crickets and shit littered her tank and it was rarely cleaned. No matter what I told them they refused to feed her more often, citing there was no time for them to go out and get food! Why even get the poor girl if you can't devote proper care? Surprised she even lived for that long.
> 
> ...


I want a water dragon or bearded dragon someday but if I was to get a water dragon I'd be building it a custom enclosure with a pond and shit because if you're going to do something you do it right and you do it to excel. I don't like to settle for just standard passable care for animals because they are all beautiful and deserve so much more than they get.
Like even the crabs I went to extreme lengths for but I wasn't able to give them above and beyond care because of space constraints. If I could have I would have gotten a bigger tank for the same amount of crabs I had because 9 crabs in a 50 gallon was pushing it real hard and that was before the 10 gallon per crab guideline was set in place.


----------



## Magpie (Oct 5, 2015)

Madolche said:


> Reptiles are so easy to be abused or neglected, especially because of how god damn easy it is to just go into petco and walk out with a ball python or a leopard gecko. Many teens do not realize that Balls can live almost 3 decades, yet they are merely treated as accessory pets to show off to their friends how 'sick and cool' it is to watch them struggle against live prey. The dangers of feeding live...it makes my stomach boil.
> 
> My BF's brother had a leopard gecko that was only fed once a month because the parents said they heard it was ok from the pet store guy. They had her on impactful sand and no heat lamp. Thing was emaciated and as big as my thumb for a 6 year old gecko. I'm talking almost no fat on her tail and was always bone cold. Dead crickets and shit littered her tank and it was rarely cleaned. No matter what I told them they refused to feed her more often, citing there was no time for them to go out and get food! Why even get the poor girl if you can't devote proper care? Surprised she even lived for that long.
> 
> ...



You sound like a friend of mine. She has many snakes (including my corn snake who I re-homed her to because I was moving out of the country) in a rack system, ranging from smaller sorts to massive boas, then having specially built enclosures for her iguanas and monitors. I admire her in her passions for her reptiles as well as high regard for animals in general. She's also passing on that love and respect to her kid, which really warms the cockles of my heart. Reptiles need a lot more people to stand up for them considering the sorts of people you mention. Giving people the right information to properly care for them is a lot more important than making people feel a little stupid at first. Just sad that there are so many who don't care and will get them as accessories and nothing more.


----------



## Madolche (Oct 5, 2015)

Magpie said:


> You sound like a friend of mine. She has many snakes (including my corn snake who I re-homed her to because I was moving out of the country) in a rack system, ranging from smaller sorts to massive boas, then having specially built enclosures for her iguanas and monitors. I admire her in her passions for her reptiles as well as high regard for animals in general. She's also passing on that love and respect to her kid, which really warms the cockles of my heart. Reptiles need a lot more people to stand up for them considering the sorts of people you mention. Giving people the right information to properly care for them is a lot more important than making people feel a little stupid at first. Just sad that there are so many who don't care and will get them as accessories and nothing more.



I will staunchly defend reptiles all my life. My snakes are more comfortable and actually eat better in their rack system but I have gotten a lot of people who know nothing about reptiles cite that they are cruel. There is a lot of misinformation out there and many people don't do a quick google search before they decide to get a pet. It's usually all impulse.



Jomadre said:


> I had a guy at a pet store try very hard to sell me a Nile Monitor as an impulse buy because it was on sale and the manager wanted it out of the store.  He seemed offended when I told him that carnivorous lizards that will one day grow to be almost as big as I am make poor impulse buys.



Monitors are the absolute worst next to giant boas for impulse buys. The shop I used to work at had burmese on display and I had to tell many people that no, you can't buy them and no, they won't stay that little forever.

Also had a shit ton of kids come in. I love teaching kids about reptiles but most of them throw screaming tantrums or get scared. Had to pass a no one under 16 without parent/ no one under 5 period policy.

Side note,  figured you guys would enjoy seeing my tegu sleeping in my bed this morning :')


Spoiler


----------



## Lackadaisy (Oct 5, 2015)

I once knew a girl who claimed she was feeding her snake a vegan diet. One of my friends paid her $100+ just so he could get the poor thing off of her hands and give it to his cousin who raises snakes for a living.


----------



## Madolche (Oct 5, 2015)

Lackadaisy said:


> I once knew a girl who claimed she was feeding her snake a vegan diet. One of my friends paid her $100+ just so he could get the poor thing off of her hands and give it to his cousin who raises snakes for a living.



Honestly trying to figure out how you can feed a snake a vegan diet. Vegan sausage links? But jfc that is horrible.


----------



## IcyHotWings (Oct 5, 2015)

My cousin belongs in this thread.

She's 15 years old now, and throughout her entire life she's been an IRL version of that one girl from tiny toons, only way bitchier. Basically she'll pester my grandpa into getting her a pet (or sometimes she'll catch a small wild animal, several geckos have suffered this fate) and she'll be all about it for maybe a month, then one of about three things will happen...

1) She'll dump it on my grandpa and make him take care of it.
2) She'll stop feeding it and it dies.
3) She'll actively murder it herself.

The only time I can actively recall the third happening was when my mom made me give my pet turtle to her. As soon as she got it home, she dropped it on its back until it died. Additionally, she likes to let her pets shit everywhere and doesn't clean it up, and for about two years I had to live in that environment. She also tends to leave plates of half-eaten food in the floor and at least when I was living with my aunt (Who lives on disability checks and spends all her time smoking weed and watching WWE when she's not being a horrible person) she would listen to Nicki Minaj and horrible country music constantly, and would leave her TV on some DVD menu when she left for school and I wasn't allowed to turn it off or else my aunt would ground me from going to the library... There's more but I've gone way off-topic and said way too much.


----------



## Tailypo (Oct 5, 2015)

Lackadaisy said:


> I once knew a girl who claimed she was feeding her snake a vegan diet. One of my friends paid her $100+ just so he could get the poor thing off of her hands and give it to his cousin who raises snakes for a living.


I _hate_ these people.

No, your carnivorous pet will _not_ survive by eating only leafy greens. I don't understand why these people can't just get a rabbit if they don't want to feed their pets meat.


----------



## sm0t (Oct 5, 2015)

Back when I lived in Texas (over 15 years ago), the local mall had a pet store that not only sold puppies and kittens but also prairie dogs.  The prairie dogs were kept in a tank with nothing for them to dig in, or play with for that matter.  I personally don't even think that prairie dogs really make good pets.

I also have a memory of looking into this column-style tank that looked somewhere between 5 and 10 gallons and was _one-third full_ of baby iguanas.  Yes, _full_, I don't remember seeing anything on the bottom of the tank except more iguanas.  I do, however, still remember the sound of their little skulls colliding with the glass as they tried to escape all of the people walking by.


----------



## Darwin Watterson (Oct 6, 2015)

A while back, I knew an individual. I wouldn't really call him a "friend," but we hung out with him. He had a fair amount of lolcow tendencies, actually. But that's off topic. See, he had a cat. A pretty adorable one, too. Probably the friendliest cat I'd ever met. This "friend" used to take sadistic delight in psychologically tormenting the poor thing. As far as I know, he never _physically_ abused it, but he had a habit of doing things to intentionally scare it. For example, like most cats, this one was scared of the vacuum cleaner. So he straddled the poor animal so it couldn't get away and kept turning the vacuum on and off. The cat was visibly terrified, but he didn't care. Another thing he'd do would be to hold the cat near the sink and turn the water on to scare it. He apparently did this often enough for the cat to not allow people to pick it up when it was in the kitchen. Granted, I _did_ see him treat the cat nicely sometimes, too. Like, he'd pet it and play with it like a normal person some times, and it seemed to hold at least _some_ affection for him (though it was friendly with everyone, so maybe it was just the way it was). But the cat's nerves were completely shot. It was really skittish most of the time. Like, getting up off the couch could scare it and make it jump into the air. I felt bad for it.


----------



## Len Kagamoney (Oct 6, 2015)

One of the malls in my state used to have a pet store, and they sold puppies.  The puppies where in tiny glass cages, with no room or bedding or anything.  I felt heartbroken for them.  I wondered how it was legal to let them live like that!

Thankfully, the store is now closed and I hope the best for the puppies


----------



## Red (Oct 6, 2015)

Len Kagamoney said:


> One of the malls in my state used to have a pet store, and they sold puppies.  The puppies where in tiny glass cages, with no room or bedding or anything.  I felt heartbroken for them.  I wondered how it was legal to let them live like that!


Where do you live?
That shit is commonplace in the US. Not so much anymore, but every PetLand you come across has racks of puppies and kittens just like this. It's perfectly legal, too. The minimum requirements for any animal in the US is a container large enough to stand up and turn around and regular access to food and water. That's it. Everything else is down to local law enforcement to decide. Even then, the federal government only has a handful of people to check every single commercial animal facility in the country, and it just doesn't get done. It's very easy to keep animals in the US in piss poor conditions and get away with it, especially critters like lions and bears because there's just not enough manpower to enforce it. The documentary _The Elephant in the Living Room, _which is available on Netflix, focuses on these problems a lot. I've heard _Blood Lions _touches on it as well but I've heard mixed reviews about it.


----------



## Globe (Oct 6, 2015)

I've got two stories, one with a sorta happy ending and another with a not-so-happy ending. The happier one is a bit convoluted, though, so it'll have to wait. If you read the one I've got right now, prepare for a little bit of powerleveling and some pretty autistic levels of detail. It's something involving my youth that I haven't told many people about, so I had a bit of a floodgate effect while writing it. 



Spoiler



For most of when I was growing up, my family and I lived on this kinda large, wooded plot of land out in the boonies of this little backwater town in Texas. We lived in a doublewide which, like most doublewides, had mostly steel beams for a foundation that raised it a few feet above the ground and was set on two parallel strips of concrete that ran the length of the house. Also like most doublewides, it had this plastic skirting that you were supposed to put up around the perimeter of the house to sort of conceal the underside of it but if you've ever lived in one of these things, you probably know from experience how flimsy and shitty that skirting is. It's really easy to punch out and all it takes is a tropical storm or some other above average inclement weather to blow it all away and leave the foundation exposed. That being said, our house wound up playing host to all sorts of critters. For the first six or seven years we lived there, we had problems with mice, rats, possums, even lizards, and the especially crafty ones sometimes wound up finding their way inside the house (there's nothing like waking up at two in the morning to take a piss, shuffling into the bathroom and finding a fucking possum chilling out on your towel rack). So when we begun to take note of some stray cats wandering around the property, we figured we should start feeding them so they'd maybe stick around and stave off some of the more invasive critters.

It worked pretty well and within about six months our pest problems were gone, though a new problem that we probably should've predicted was pretty quick to burgeon; the strays were breeding and looked to be doing so at a faster rate than we'd be able to keep up with. To try and slow it down, we decided to snag two of them, the only two females in one of the litters, and raise them ourselves as indoor cats and there begins the ownership horror story because at the time, we weren't really cat people and didn't know shit about taking care of them and while we stumbled through the obvious stuff decently enough, some of the more serious things didn't get taken care of until they made themselves apparent (eg, if you're going to keep a female cat but don't plan to let it breed, you _need _to have it spayed, not doing so will end up killing it). We'd noticed the other litters born on our property weren't very healthy (most died as kittens), but the two we'd plucked seemed just fine, one was named Jersey because of her black and white coloration, and the other was a calico we'd named Lola (I forget why, I think it was for the Kinks song or something). It's probably important to note that most of this was my mother's idea and she ended up arbitrarily assigning ownership of the cats, saying that Jersey was hers and that Lola would be mine and my brother's. I use the word "arbitrarily" because neither me or my brother had ever said or even _implied _that we wanted a pet to be responsible for, and we were both pretty sure that if either us ever moved out and wanted to take this cat with us, our mother wouldn't allow it. It seemed she mostly said the cat was "ours" just so she could shoehorn any prospective vet bills onto my brother, who had recently gotten his first job.

It was especially funny it worked out this way because though my brother had sort of a soft spot for her, I never particularly liked Lola. She was one of those cats that demanded attention from people but at the very same time was unreasonably skittish, which often led to her trying to beat down your bedroom door if it was closed (or just sit outside of it caterwauling), not do anything when you'd eventually open the door, then tearing off to the other end of the house like you'd tried to kill her if, god forbid, you moved towards her too suddenly. I certainly didn't _hate _her or anything (how do you even hate a pet?), but she was kind of just annoying to me at the end of the day and for that reason, I never really got attached to her, though the rest of my family did.

About five years after taking her and Jersey in (when I was in high school), Lola died somewhat suddenly of a pulmonary disease. I say "somewhat" because it all took place over the span of about twenty four hours, though earlier in the day, me and my brother both noticed something was wrong with her. Pro-tip, if you can pick a cat up from wherever it was sitting and set it down somewhere else and it makes _no_ attempt to move or even change its position in any way, you to need to take it to a fucking vet because something's wrong with it. Doubly so if the cat's on the skittish side. This was basically what was happening with Lola, she wasn't really responding to being touched despite her usual jumpiness, and when we picked her up and put her in another spot, she'd kinda just listlessly flop over. For this reason alone, we knew whatever the problem was, it was serious and we tried our best to convince our mother to take the cat to the vet, but she wound up blowing it off and even making irrational excuses for the behavior when we insisted that she see it for herself. I didn't have money or a license so there really wasn't anything I could do at that point and though employed, my brother wasn't in any better of a situation since he was having trouble just affording the gas to get back and forth to work. Our dad _might _have taken us seriously but was hours away doing on-call work. We'd pretty much hit a dead end and being largely indifferent to it, I just shrugged my shoulders and went on about my business. My brother kept Lola in his room and tried to do the same.

At some point early the next morning, he was woken up by the cat doing some sort of dry-heave in an attempt to breathe. I was awake in the next room marathoning a video game and was the second to see her. It was...fucking awful. Like, I'd killed some of the possums and rats that had gotten into our house in the past, but it somehow hadn't prepared me for seeing a cat in its death throes. She was just slumped back in this papasan chair that she'd spent the entire day in, her eyes were dilated and there was some sort of frothy shit coming out of her mouth every time she heaved. It was the most _human _thing I recall ever seeing an animal do, desperately clinging to life even though it was so clearly futile. It was also the closest I came to being legitimately _upset_ by the whole thing_. _Like the cat or not, she didn't deserve to die at _all_, let alone in such a shitty, miserable way.

Well, we obviously woke our parents up and they scrambled to get Lola to some emergency animal clinic in a frantic attempt to save her, but I think we all knew it was the end of the line, I remember my dad later telling me that she was practically dead by the time they got there. I stayed behind with my brother and tried to go to sleep. After it was all said and done, the vet told my parents it was some sort of heart irregularity that did Lola in (either it was too small or too large, I can't quite recall) and that it was actually abnormal for her to have lived as long as she did, so even if we'd taken her to the vet when my brother and I noticed something was off, there likely wouldn't have been anything that could've been done for her. My family was pretty well devastated, though my mother took it the hardest. I guess she realized that if she'd listened to us, she might have at least spared the cat some unnecessary suffering and she probably felt guilty as a result. She's never been a very stable person though, and whether I'm right about that or not, she spent the next few weeks following Lola's death lashing out at the rest of us, berating me and my brother for not grieving "enough" and generally being an enormous, insufferable bitch, doing and saying things that made it pretty clear that she was coming unglued. She had my dad put a statue over the spot where he'd buried Lola, and every now and again, you'd see her standing out there talking to it. When she found out the rest of us weren't doing the same, she made it a point to take these little passive-aggressive pot shots at us over it ("I've gone out there and kept Lola company every day this week. Why haven't _you_?") and since I was the only person that didn't really show any emotion over the cat dying, I heard the most of it.

It all came to head when she had this massive fucking meltdown and locked herself in her room and left the rest of us thinking she was about to off herself (albeit, she hadn't ever explicitly said anything to that effect). My dad and brother were at work, so I was the only other person at home at the time and in the minute or so I'd gone outside to find something I could beat her door down with, she left the room, hopped in her truck and took off. None of us could get a hold of her, though she showed back up about an hour later, right before my dad got home, and she had brought two siamese-manx kittens with her. They were litter-mates that she'd gotten from an old co-worker. She said one was going to be named "Lolita", and the other me or my brother could name. 

 None of us knew how to respond to that. For the next day or so, we kinda just went with it and noticed that her behavior was improving. I guess afterwards we all just decided without actually saying so that if letting her have some sort of replacement for Lola kept her from acting _completely _batshit, we could deal. I lived with my parents for another five(ish) years after Lola died, moving out just before I was twenty one. At that point, there were about thirteen cats living there (I say "about", because I really, seriously stopped paying attention the last year I was living there and lost count). Every six months to a year after Lola died, my mother would bring in another one or two kittens either from the strays outside or from a friend, insisting that one of them be given a name that was some sort of derivative of "Lola". Like she did with my brother, she would say some of these cats were "mine" so I'd have to take care of its vet bills, etc, though unlike my brother I never made any attempt to take any of them with me or even express any desire to have a cat as a pet, the situation was so bad by the time I moved out, I was thrilled just to be getting the fuck away from it all. I don't even want to know how many they've got over there now.



^^ TL;DR: a cat my family has dies and it makes my mother go crazy (...crazi_er_, anyway).


----------



## Bugaboo (Oct 6, 2015)

Globe said:


> I've got two stories, one with a sorta happy ending and another with a not-so-happy ending. The happier one is a bit convoluted, though, so it'll have to wait. If you read the one I've got right now, prepare for a little bit of powerleveling and some pretty autistic levels of detail. It's something involving my youth that I haven't told many people about, so I had a bit of a floodgate effect while writing it.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Speaking of parents never letting you take a clearly dying animal to the vet, we had two guinea pigs, one died suddenly at the age of 5 (like we had given them some treats like we always do when we cut up vegetables for supper and they start squealing for food. After we finished eating we look in their house and one of them had just dropped dead) the remaining piggy lived to be about 7 but around the age of 6 he developed a horrifiying tumor/abcess thing 



Spoiler: Gross AF



and it popped one day and it looked like the inside was full of clusters of grape things


 and I kept begging my mother to take him to the vet and she was like "no, there's nothing they can do" or "he's fine" and we both loved him a lot (his name was Ricky btw) I think she did that to kind of beat around the bush that we couldn't afford to get him help, we got the pigs before my mother and father seperated and when they were together we were financially stable enough to get them vet care if they needed it. Anyway one day Ricky started having trouble breathing (respiratory problems) so I convinced my mother that it was time to get him put down so we finally took him to the vet to have him put down and it was very emotional. 
Anyway I also feel bad because when we got the piggies we didn't know I was allergic to them (I was only allergic to them as adults because I can cuddle baby piggies with no issues) so I physically couldn't clean their cage so my mum got stuck with it. For some reason she thought it was a great idea to put a fucking grate for them to stand on instead of a flat surface as they should have had because all their dumps would fall through the grate amd it would be easier to clean for her (still a stupid fucking idea) and I think that fucked up their feet pretty badly and I still feel bad about if to this day because I was in no position to build them a larger cage and I couldn't clean them without getting sick as fuck


----------



## Globe (Oct 6, 2015)

Bugaboo said:


> For some reason she thought it was a great idea to put a fucking grate for them to stand on instead of a flat surface as they should have had because all their dumps would fall through the grate amd it would be easier to clean for her (still a stupid fucking idea) and I think that fucked up their feet pretty badly



 Yeah, funnily enough, my kinda happier story involved me buying and raising some live pinkies from a douchey, fucked up co-worker so he wouldn't feed them to his tarantula. Raising orphaned pinkies is a really tough thing to do though (of the ten I bought, only four survived) and in all the youtube homework I did on it, I remember them explicitly saying not to put any sort of wirey type thing on the bottom of the habitat because as they got older, they'd develop bumblefoot.


----------



## Ido (Oct 6, 2015)

I had to tell a different relative not to bathe with her Bearded Dragon because that was unsanitary as fuck. The beardie now has a calcium deficiency but I will give her credit, she took him to the vet and got him the shots he needed. He's still not in the best shape, but at least she cares enough to get him proper medical care.


----------



## Lackadaisy (Oct 7, 2015)

Tailypo said:


> I _hate_ these people.
> 
> No, your carnivorous pet will _not_ survive by eating only leafy greens. I don't understand why these people can't just get a rabbit if they don't want to feed their pets meat.



As I recall, she wanted to 'teach' it the 'right way.' I have no fucking clue what she was thinking.


----------



## Kenneth Erwin Engelhardt (Oct 10, 2015)

Magpie said:


> You sound like a friend of mine. She has many snakes (including my corn snake who I re-homed her to because I was moving out of the country) in a rack system, ranging from smaller sorts to massive boas, then having specially built enclosures for her iguanas and monitors. I admire her in her passions for her reptiles as well as high regard for animals in general. She's also passing on that love and respect to her kid, which really warms the cockles of my heart. Reptiles need a lot more people to stand up for them considering the sorts of people you mention. Giving people the right information to properly care for them is a lot more important than making people feel a little stupid at first. Just sad that there are so many who don't care and will get them as accessories and nothing more.


 I think Corn Snakes are one of the most beautiful snakes I've ever seen.

Why isn't the United States on this list? http://www.declawing.com/countries-that-outlaw-declawing


----------



## AnOminous (Oct 10, 2015)

Thundersteam said:


> Why isn't the United States on this list? http://www.declawing.com/countries-that-outlaw-declawing



Because that's a list of countries that outlaw declawing, and the United States doesn't.

However, some jurisdictions (like most of the big cities in California) do.


----------



## Kenneth Erwin Engelhardt (Oct 10, 2015)

AnOminous said:


> Because that's a list of countries that outlaw declawing, and the United States doesn't.
> 
> However, some jurisdictions (like most of the big cities in California) do.


 I know this and it's an embarrassment. .


----------



## MerriedxReldnahc (Oct 10, 2015)

Certain organizations like my local Feline Network make you sign a waiver that you will not get your cat declawed, becasue it takes their first line of defence away from them if they're going to be an outdoor cat. That and the "removing their goddamn knuckles thing".


----------



## vertexwindi (Oct 12, 2015)

This thread makes me feel bad about being a bit neglectful towards my cats when I was younger.

I remember one time I was feeling really down, and out of nowhere my fatter cat came in the room and cuddled up with me, as if she knew I needed some company. Same cat also knew how to open our kitchen door and get into the fridge, and took dumps in our toilet when I didn't feel like cleaning the litter.

The younger thinner cat was really fun to play with, pretty hyperactive and busy. She liked to ride the other cat like a horse sometimes, the fat cat didn't really like it but I thought it was funny.

I miss them.


----------



## Flowers For Sonichu (Oct 12, 2015)

So I had a couple of lil faggots that I kept as pets when I lived in the US.  They were super cute but shit way too much for my liking and ate so much goddamn food but one of them was really sweet and I liked watching them chase each other around and eat food.  I would leave them with my boss when I'd go on a trip for work and he'd take pretty good care of them.  When work sent me to China, he agreed to watch them for me.  He later got more guinea pigs and his daughter messaged me on FB asking that if she kept a male and female guinea pig together, would they have babies.... so they now have a bunch.  Later on, he got fired for being an asshole (cussed out the big boss in front of clients and refused to do my job duties and the like) and when I came back to the US for a vacation, I asked him where they had gone.  "I don't know man, I disappear. I believe in free range guinea pigs but it doesn't matter that they're gone because I have so many" Fucking asshole let all the guinea pigs run around his garage and they probably got eaten by a coyote


----------



## Bugaboo (Oct 12, 2015)

Flowers For Sonichu said:


> So I had a couple of lil fucking LOLCOWS that I kept as pets when I lived in the US.  They were super cute but shit way too much for my liking and ate so much goddamn food but one of them was really sweet and I liked watching them chase each other around and eat food.  I would leave them with my boss when I'd go on a trip for work and he'd take pretty good care of them.  When work sent me to China, he agreed to watch them for me.  He later got more guinea pigs and his daughter messaged me on FB asking that if she kept a male and female guinea pig together, would they have babies.... so they now have a bunch.  Later on, he got fired for being an asshole (cussed out the big boss in front of clients and refused to do my job duties and the like) and when I came back to the US for a vacation, I asked him where they had gone.  "I don't know man, I disappear. I believe in free range guinea pigs but it doesn't matter that they're gone because I have so many" Fucking asshole let all the guinea pigs run around his garage and they probably got eaten by a coyote


I hate people who are mean to piggies


----------



## Unironic Subversiveness (Oct 20, 2015)

My mom and dad's neighbor has a bad way with animals, in that she likes baby animals and that's it. She's had multiple dogs and once they aren't babies they're basically tossed out to fend for themselves. She dropped who knows what on a purebred pug, poodle and bichon frise and designer mutts. All left outside after a while. There was also the purebred bulldog she got for her husband who was dying of cancer, he was left outside then gotten rid of when (surprise!!!) the stick thin dying man couldn't handle him.

Then she got a "low maintenance" pet, a cat. Who was always outside. Kitty was unfixed and so she had kittens and then those kittens had kittens with each other. Most have either died, gotten run over and a mom and litter were taken to a shelter by another neighbor. Neighbor lady says her current cat (because the girl kitty died or was taken away, I suppose) is fixed but he's a Siamese and there is always at least one Siamese in the litters.

It breaks my heart because both of the mama cats that had their litters near our house were very sweet and loving, even letting us handle the kittens. And the first litter popped up right after our old lady cat died and one of the kittens looked just like her. Plus I took care of some of her dogs when she was away and seeing things like the pug out of breath and grey muzzled in the cold and a big blood smear in the road that was formerly the bichon hurt me.


----------



## MysticMisty (Oct 21, 2015)

Ido said:


> Here's a chart with some lizards, maybe you'll see the one S had?


Derp, sorry. It kinda looks like the one in the middle with the funky tail, but I'm not sure, particularly since they had normal tails. I find it mildly amusing to see a Gila monster on there since they're actually native to this area and my folks even encountered one once.



sm0t said:


> I really wish that the myths surrounding goldfish would just die already. I've lost count how many times I had to spell out in the simplest terms possible why you can't keep goldfish in a bowl (or a betta, or a pleco, or a single neon tetra at one point...), and people still don't wrap their head around it. Our doormat of a manager usually ended up ringing up the goldfish and bowl setup for the over-entitled dumbasses anyway, after gratuitous amounts of bitching and moaning from the customer about how they don't want to drop the money needed for the actual tank and filter setup that is needed for a goldfish to survive as well as go through the nitrogen cycle. Goldfish grow huge (8+ inches) despite the myth that they won't grow larger than their tank, and they produce a lot of waste. Hence why they often just end up getting flushed down the toilet a week later.


My own mother can't wrap her head around it, despite buying a lot of goldfish for my sister and I way back when (well, mostly my sister because I was very young and never even had a say in naming them). Personally I'm not a fan of goldfish because not only do they shit frequently, it hangs from them in long ropes. Just...ew! I do like bettas though, they don't crap nearly as much and personally I find them prettier. We've had a few that lived for years.


----------



## RV 229 (Oct 21, 2015)

When I was a kid, I had horses, and I lived in a neighborhood full of horse owners. @Goofy Logic wasn't kidding when he said other owners were stuck up pricks.

Our next door neighbor had a pony and a  horse that she kept in a paddock that was less than half an acre in size, and she fed them alfalfa hay. (Go figure.) For some reason, she had a grudge against my family, and animal control mysteriously showed up at hour house on more than one occasion, took a look at our horses and the pasture they lived in, went "why the fuck were we called here?" and left. 

Had another neighbor girl that was an absolute bitch to me in school, but kept showing up at my house because she wanted to ride our horses. My mom let her ride my pony once, and that ended up being a mistake because she pulled on the reins hard enough to make his mouth bleed. We didn't let neighbor kids ride our horses after that. But eventually she got her own horse, which was kept in a tiny paddock and she eventually got bored with and wouldn't ride anymore. So her horse got to spend years doing nothing but standing in a small pasture. Sometime around middle school when my pony was old as fuck and wasn't digesting his food properly anymore (this pony was pushing his thirties for anyone wondering) she started spreading rumors that I neglected and starved him. 

By the time I was in high school, my parents gave our horses to somebody who had a ranch because they were all getting too old and the vet bills were getting too high. So I didn't have horses anymore, but I met another girl who did. One day I went to her house for her birthday, and noticed that her yard was the size typical for a suburban home, but she had a stable built in her back yard. The stable and a swimming pool was all it had room for. And she had _three_ horses. And she let one of them get pregnant. She kept her horses in their stalls all day and wouldn't let them out except for when she wanted to ride. I was blunt and told her that she had no means to keep any of her horses, but she wouldn't listen to me because I didn't have horses and she was a _country girl_, dammit. I took some time from her party to groom her horses because she hadn't that morning. (You're supposed to groom them twice a day, and their hooves were caked with dirt.)

In terms of space, for anyone wondering, keeping three horses in a small stable is like keeping three goldfish in a half-gallon bowl. You're supposed to have at least an acre of land per horse.


----------



## Bugaboo (Oct 21, 2015)

Spoiler: Spider Sperging



I rescued my taranutla from some dude. I found her listed on kijiji after Agrippa (my first tarantula) passed away from old age. I was checking kijiji for spiders because after he died I felt a lot of complex feelings like anger and confusion and one of those feelings was "I NEED A NEW ONE" 
Anyway there's a random ass ad with a shit picture of a tarantula living on bark chips(!) with no water(!!) and the listing just said "Brown Tarantula: 1 CAD"
I promptly emailed and said "Do you know what species she is, and is she really a dollar?" Dude emailed back and said "Well, she's brown and I want 50 dollars for her (we'll get back to this)" I asked some spider nerds to ID her for me because I'm bad at IDing tarantulas. Turns out she was a G. rosea or Chilean Rose Hair. Now, Grammostola rosea are literally the most common and cheapest of all tarantulas in the hobby, the shit pet store that I don't shop at because they're rude and cruel to their animals has one for 20 dollars with a large kritter keeper. I dunno what kind of crazy store this dude bought her at but he said he paid 100 dollars for her (she was in the smallest size kritter keeper on the market when I got her) eventually I whittled him down by saying I could get one at the pet store near me for 20 with a tank and he accepted 10 dollars for her (not after saying, I already have a guy who will pay 50, which I think he just said to get me to pay what he wanted. If he had a guy willing to pay 50, why would he take the offer of the chick who offers 10?) eventually through the emails I realized this guy has no idea what he is doing and just bought her on impulse, I was dead set on getting this spider into my care to get her away from him.
Anyway, I drove out to farm country and the guy brings her out. Like I said, smallest kritter keeper you can get (this is a tarantula as big as my entire hand, about 6-8 inches long) bark chips, no hides and no water. I had asked him if she had ever been aggresive with him, he said he didn't know, he always handled her with gloves. The reason I asked is because Chilean Rose are all individuals and have incredibly varying temperments from spider to spider, I was concerned she was going to be aggresive but I wanted to get her into a good home so badly I'd deal with a spider who was constantly plotting my death. The guy said he bought her and hid her in his room and then his mom found her and demanded she be gotten rid of, another sign of an impulse purchase. 
Anyway got her home and let her settle in for about a month, then I decided to see if she was aggresive or not so I picked her up. Turns out she's the most docile spider in the universe, she'll barely even attack crickets and when she does she needs like, 5 minutes to think about it. I even took her to boarding one time when we were away for a week and the people there said "I hope you don't mind, I held your spider. She's so friendly!" And this dude was so scared of her he handled her with gloves.
Anyway, happy 1.5 year anniversary Araña my sweet little babu


----------



## Lalala (Oct 21, 2015)

Sadly this horror story is my own fault and I'm still deeply ashamed of it...
A few years ago a friend of mine had two pet axolotls. For those who aren't aware axolotls are relatively easy to care for however they do have some very strict care specifications relating to the kind of water you use (standing water), the amount of water changes they need, their diet, temperature and general environment in their tank. Anyway one of their axolotls died and the friend was getting set to move, they already had a tank of snapping turtles to move and her mum wasn't prepared to transport the lotl too, so she was planning on putting it in the freezer so it would die painlessly. I was horrified and paid her for the lotl, tank and equipment.
The thing is I had zero experience with...well any pet, my parents had never allowed them in the house so I was relying on this woman for information. But it seems she didn't do her research because ALL the care instructions she gave me where for the turtles, not the lotl. So when I got her she was already sick and I tried everything that the woman said. It was only later when she got REALLY sick and I did further research that I learned just how harmful the information I had been given was; I was using salt water which was incredibly harmful, the temperature was all wrong, there was no hide in the tank, you name it. I did everything I could to backtrack and make the environment safer but it was too late, Lottie died a couple of days later.
Moral of the story, if you ever get a pet you're unsure about do every bit of research you can BEFORE you start taking care of it. And if someone goes from having two to one before you get the other, they're doing something wrong and do NOT listen to their advice. Still feel really bad about the whole thing to this day, might have saved Lottie if I hadn't listened to the advice of that fucking idiot.


----------



## Bugaboo (Oct 21, 2015)

Lalala said:


> Sadly this horror story is my own fault and I'm still deeply ashamed of it...
> A few years ago a friend of mine had two pet axolotls. For those who aren't aware axolotls are relatively easy to care for however they do have some very strict care specifications relating to the kind of water you use (standing water), the amount of water changes they need, their diet, temperature and general environment in their tank. Anyway one of their axolotls died and the friend was getting set to move, they already had a tank of snapping turtles to move and her mum wasn't prepared to transport the lotl too, so she was planning on putting it in the freezer so it would die painlessly. I was horrified and paid her for the lotl, tank and equipment.
> The thing is I had zero experience with...well any pet, my parents had never allowed them in the house so I was relying on this woman for information. But it seems she didn't do her research because ALL the care instructions she gave me where for the turtles, not the lotl. So when I got her she was already sick and I tried everything that the woman said. It was only later when she got REALLY sick and I did further research that I learned just how harmful the information I had been given was; I was using salt water which was incredibly harmful, the temperature was all wrong, there was no hide in the tank, you name it. I did everything I could to backtrack and make the environment safer but it was too late, Lottie died a couple of days later.
> Moral of the story, if you ever get a pet you're unsure about do every bit of research you can BEFORE you start taking care of it. And if someone goes from having two to one before you get the other, they're doing something wrong and do NOT listen to their advice. Still feel really bad about the whole thing to this day, might have saved Lottie if I hadn't listened to the advice of that fucking idiot.


Same thing about not listening to Petsmart and Petco, they either know jack shit or can only give company mandated information (which is always wrong)
Mother fucking Petsmart told me mini fiddler crabs could live their whole lives totally submerged in water when I was a kid and guess what happened? They drowned.


----------



## Lalala (Oct 21, 2015)

Bugaboo said:


> Same thing about not listening to Petsmart and Petco, they either know jack shit or can only give company mandated information (which is always wrong)
> Mother fucking Petsmart told me mini fiddler crabs could live their whole lives totally submerged in water when I was a kid and guess what happened? They drowned.


It's ridiculous knowing shit like this still goes on, before the internet it could be argued that misinformation was an inevitable consequence of buying/selling uncommon or high maintenance animals but nowadays you can literally learn everything you could ever need about an animal in seconds and for free yet some shops/owners don't bother taking the time and animals suffer as a consequence. I'm pissed at myself for not doing that research but honestly when my friend's mum's first axolotl died it baffles me that she didn't think to try and find out why and prevent the same happening to the other.


----------



## Bugaboo (Oct 21, 2015)

Lalala said:


> It's ridiculous knowing shit like this still goes on, before the internet it could be argued that misinformation was an inevitable consequence of buying/selling uncommon or high maintenance animals but nowadays you can literally learn everything you could ever need about an animal in seconds and for free yet some shops/owners don't bother taking the time and animals suffer as a consequence. I'm pissed at myself for not doing that research but honestly when my friend's mum's first axolotl died it baffles me that she didn't think to try and find out why and prevent the same happening to the other.


I personally know people (especially in the hermit crab circle) who have written Petsmart and Petco's corporate offices several times and offered correct information and they always get a letter sent back saying "WE HAVE VETS LOOK AT ALL OUR ANIMALS" "OUR CARE IS TO THE HIGHEST STANDARDS" 
It's corporate bullshit that they won't change and they put the short term profits above the long term well being of their livestock.


----------



## Lalala (Oct 21, 2015)

Bugaboo said:


> I personally know people (especially in the hermit crab circle) who have written Petsmart and Petco's corporate offices several times and offered correct information and they always get a letter sent back saying "WE HAVE VETS LOOK AT ALL OUR ANIMALS" "OUR CARE IS TO THE HIGHEST STANDARDS"
> It's corporate bullshit that they won't change and they put the short term profits above the long term well being of their livestock.


Because fuck animals lives, maintaining company policy is more important, besides they're just crabs amirite?
God words can't describe how much I hate shit like that.


----------



## Red (Oct 21, 2015)

Bugaboo said:


> "WE HAVE VETS LOOK AT ALL OUR ANIMALS" "OUR CARE IS TO THE HIGHEST STANDARDS"
> It's corporate bullshit that they won't change and they put the short term profits above the long term well being of their livestock.


According to a dear friend of mine who has worked as a petcare manager for Petsmart, that's just the tip of the iceberg.
Rainbow Exotics is the company that both companies get their birds, reptiles and mammals from. Surprise, it's a mill. While they're required to give the age of their animals they're always lying; everything is usually labeled "6 weeks" despite this being obviously untrue. The veterinary clinic that assesses the animals is a subsidiary of Petsmart and they're a serious fucking joke. Same goes for Petco, I believe. They don't know how to care for exotics in the slightest. When a conure was shipped to them by Rainbow that barely had open eyes and probably belonged in an incubator, petcare had to consult a local parrot rescue for advice because the vets didn't do jack shit. Young babies, animals with broken legs, and animals with pneumonia are commonplace. And none of them are tame, either.
Also a kid dumped pool chlorine in the sump for all the aquatic animals and killed them all. And he got off with a warning. Did it again. Got off with a warning. He kept his job till he voluntarily quit.


----------



## Lalala (Oct 21, 2015)

Red said:


> Also a kid dumped pool chlorine in the sump for all the aquatic animals and killed them all. And he got off with a warning. Did it again. Got off with a warning. He kept his job till he voluntarily quit.


Trying to avoid gif reactions lately but



Spoiler











Powerlevelling a touch but I work with kids and can you IMAGINE anyone getting off anywhere nearly as lightly if something like that happened to a bunch of toddlers? But noooo, it's only animals, it doesn't matter....oy vey I give up on humanity.
Edit: Oops, forgot my spoiler, my bad!


----------



## Red (Oct 21, 2015)

Lalala said:


> Trying to avoid gif reactions lately but
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Or, if this were cats or dogs. I remember the uproar of the dog that died in the dryer at a petsmart about a year ago, but nothing like that ever happens with fish or reptiles. 
Cichlids are extremely socially complex and the more we learn about them the more we realize they're as smart as dogs. They're really amazing animals... but because they're not fluffy and cute they tend to be out of people's interest.


----------



## AnOminous (Oct 21, 2015)

Bugaboo said:


> I personally know people (especially in the hermit crab circle) who have written Petsmart and Petco's corporate offices several times and offered correct information and they always get a letter sent back saying "WE HAVE VETS LOOK AT ALL OUR ANIMALS" "OUR CARE IS TO THE HIGHEST STANDARDS"
> It's corporate bullshit that they won't change and they put the short term profits above the long term well being of their livestock.



Never, ever give a penny to either of these shitty, animal-torturing, scumbag operations.


----------



## Overcast (Oct 21, 2015)

My late dog Lola went through quite a bit in life before she passed away.

My older sister got her for us from a pet shop. The papers we got say she was a "purebred long haired chihuahua". But she clearly had some features from other dogs. That was the least of her issues though. She had pneumonia and at one point, my mom attempted to return her, but (thankfully) the shop wouldn't take her back. We had to take extensive care of her when we got her before she finally got better. It just shows how little care a lot of these pet shops gave their animals I suppose.

At one point, the tear duct in one of her eyes got damaged, and we spent months using eye drops and medication to keep it lubricated. We then went on a family trip to Cancun and hired a dogsitter to care for her and give her the treatment she needed.

We came back to find she wasn't doing her job, which resulted in Lola's tear duct become irreversibly damaged. So we had to get it removed.

In a way, this was a good thing, as Lola was no longer dealing with a rotting eye and after she recovered, she no longer needed to wear a cone to prevent her from scratching at it. But it kinda angered me to find that the person we hired to take care of her completely neglected to do so. To top things off, we found men's underwear on my parents' bed that didn't belong to my dad. >_>


----------



## Unironic Subversiveness (Oct 21, 2015)

PetSmart is a pretty awful place. My mother adopted a cat from one of their rescue things and she is the most neurotic animal I've ever seen. And she's morbidly obese, like when they first got her you couldn't see all of her legs she was so big. She hid under the bed most of the time until she got used to my parents, then she had to get used to me, then my girlfriend when she moved in with my parents and each time it was a huge ordeal.

Now she sits on the love seat in my mom's office area and won't move unless if she needs to use the litter box or eat, and if you twitch or walk or breathe when she's not on the love seat she'll run back to that or under the bed if you really scared her. She's very sweet and we love her a great deal (she's even lost weight) but it's been difficult to fix her because of the conditions she was in.

And she runs whenever you raise your hand a certain way, like she's afraid you're going to beat her. :/


----------



## Red (Oct 21, 2015)

Unironic Subversiveness said:


> PetSmart is a pretty awful place. My mother adopted a cat from one of their rescue things and she is the most neurotic animal I've ever seen. And she's morbidly obese, like when they first got her you couldn't see all of her legs she was so big. She hid under the bed most of the time until she got used to my parents, then she had to get used to me, then my girlfriend when she moved in with my parents and each time it was a huge ordeal.


Well, that's not necessarily PetSmart's fault. Their adoption programs for cats are actually quite nice, where they just display cats from local rescues so they get more exposure and are hopefully adopted. It was the rescue/previous owner's fault in this one.

PetSmart is still shitty though.


----------



## Unironic Subversiveness (Oct 21, 2015)

Red said:


> Well, that's not necessarily PetSmart's fault. Their adoption programs for cats are actually quite nice, where they just display cats from local rescues so they get more exposure and are hopefully adopted. It was the rescue/previous owner's fault in this one.
> 
> PetSmart is still shitty though.



Well, even if they aren't really at fault, they also could check the local rescues and shelters because all the cats there from the same rescue seemed to be in about the same condition as her. So it's shitty business dealings as well. She was also in the store for about a month, if not longer, and that PetSmart is so shitty even by PetSmart standards so who knows what happened beyond dirty food, water and boxes and no stimulation.


----------



## AnOminous (Oct 21, 2015)

Unironic Subversiveness said:


> And she runs whenever you raise your hand a certain way, like she's afraid you're going to beat her. :/



Sadly, when cats (or any animals) do that, usually it's because someone actually has.


----------



## Trapped_Fairy (Oct 21, 2015)

My neighbor's kids are the absolute worst pet owners and I really wanna slap the shit outta their parents for letting them get away with all the shit they do to their animals. The worst part? Because their dad's a cop, nothing has been done by the proper authorities to help the poor babies.

In the eight or so years I've lived next door to them they've had four dogs, two of which died after years of being left in the backyard to rot once they were no longer puppies. I'd seen those brats kick at their older dogs through the fence whenever the dogs would bark back when they were alive. The kids were given another puppy about two years ago who would try and run away constantly because the boy (about 10) would beat her if she wouldn't go fetch the ball. Their newest dog is a tiny Chihuahua puppy who their girl (12) keeps yelling at because it doesn't want to be squeezed all the time and won't come when called.

Now I wouldn't be so livid over these kids because, hey, they're kids, but they decided to cross the line and have been caught picking on my dogs. I caught their son smacking my youngest dog, a real sweetheart, with his tennis racket! I yelled at him some and went to his parents because that shit is deplorable, and they just laughed saying that boys will be boys. My dog was so upset that she was afraid to even step outside for over a week. 

And they also stole the eggs out of a bird's nest on my front porch. Damn rotten bastards.


----------



## RV 229 (Oct 21, 2015)

Trapped_Fairy said:


> My neighbor's kids are the absolute worst pet owners and I really wanna slap the shit outta their parents for letting them get away with all the shit they do to their animals. The worst part? Because their dad's a cop, nothing has been done by the proper authorities to help the poor babies.
> 
> In the eight or so years I've lived next door to them they've had four dogs, two of which died after years of being left in the backyard to rot once they were no longer puppies. I'd seen those brats kick at their older dogs through the fence whenever the dogs would bark back when they were alive. The kids were given another puppy about two years ago who would try and run away constantly because the boy (about 10) would beat her if she wouldn't go fetch the ball. Their newest dog is a tiny Chihuahua puppy who their girl (12) keeps yelling at because it doesn't want to be squeezed all the time and won't come when called.
> 
> ...


I would have taken his tennis racket and broken it over my knee.


----------



## sm0t (Oct 22, 2015)

Red said:


> According to a dear friend of mine who has worked as a petcare manager for Petsmart, that's just the tip of the iceberg.
> Rainbow Exotics is the company that both companies get their birds, reptiles and mammals from. Surprise, it's a mill. While they're required to give the age of their animals they're always lying; everything is usually labeled "6 weeks" despite this being obviously untrue. The veterinary clinic that assesses the animals is a subsidiary of Petsmart and they're a serious fucking joke. Same goes for Petco, I believe. They don't know how to care for exotics in the slightest. When a conure was shipped to them by Rainbow that barely had open eyes and probably belonged in an incubator, petcare had to consult a local parrot rescue for advice because the vets didn't do jack shit. Young babies, animals with broken legs, and animals with pneumonia are commonplace. And none of them are tame, either.
> Also a kid dumped pool chlorine in the sump for all the aquatic animals and killed them all. And he got off with a warning. Did it again. Got off with a warning. He kept his job till he voluntarily quit.



Not sure if the Petco I worked at bought their animals from them or other (equally horrible) mills.  I just remember my manager constantly bitching about how our company kept buying from "breeders in Argentina."  Regardless, the reptiles and amphibians were almost never sufficiently heated in their packages, and since they come from South America they go a long time without eating.  The leopard geckos are often skinny and already sick with cryptosporidiosis by the time they get to our store.  And like you said, the vet that the store used didn't know jack shit about how to treat it, simply prescribing antibiotics that do nothing for a young gecko already in the late stages of crypto other than stress it out even more than it already was while the dumbass employee tries to syringe-feed the meds to them before dying.  And of course the company wouldn't be arsed to pony up the money needed for actual treatment that could at least give the lizards a chance at recovery.


----------



## MalWart (Oct 22, 2015)

We had gone out for dinner one night, and once we got home, one of our cats was running around the house like hell. We were absolutely unsure of what was going on. I eventually sensed a foul smell in the air. It turns out she had eaten a piece of ribbon, and her ass was paying the price.


----------



## For The Internet (Oct 22, 2015)

Globe said:


> Yeah, funnily enough, my kinda happier story involved me buying and raising some live pinkies from a douchey, fucked up co-worker so he wouldn't feed them to his tarantula. Raising orphaned pinkies is a really tough thing to do though (of the ten I bought, only four survived) and in all the youtube homework I did on it, I remember them explicitly saying not to put any sort of wirey type thing on the bottom of the habitat because as they got older, they'd develop bumblefoot.



That was a really nice thing to do. Feeder rats and mice have such short, miserable lives. Serious props to you, raising pinkies is incredibly hard. I raised a wild baby rat from about the age of 3 weeks (on chocolate flavoured puppy milk, of all things) and that was pretty easy, but I don't know if I could have helped him pull through as a baby and that was with a good 10 years of rat and mouse experience at the time.

And yes, wire floors absolutely give animals like rats, mice, piggies, chinchillas ect bumblefoot.


God am I glad my parents are animal lovers.


----------



## MerriedxReldnahc (Oct 22, 2015)

MalWart said:


> We had gone out for dinner one night, and once we got home, one of our cats was running around the house like hell. We were absolutely unsure of what was going on. I eventually sensed a foul smell in the air. It turns out she had eaten a piece of ribbon, and her ass was paying the price.


My dumb fat tabby tried to eat string once. She was just playing with it at first, but then I heard her wheezing and had to pull out like, 4 inches of string from her throat! That's never been a problem for her in the past, so I was kind of worried.


----------



## Lemon Vagina (Oct 22, 2015)

Adopted two rats from the adoption section in a large chain pet store that'll go unnamed. I asked to check them over and they seemed fine, but I didn't get much time. The employee was basically like yeah so are you gonna take them or not. She also told me they'd been treated for mycoplasmosis "just in case" and I (stupidly) believed her, since they looked fine.

I get them home and I already have two other rats, both adopted from the local SPCA shelter. After a couple of days I start to introduce them in order to form a mischief and all is going well... until I come back through and find three of them eating the fourth one, one of the rats I'd just brought home. Despite taking the other three to the vet they all gradually died of mycoplasmosis over the following two weeks.

Moral of the story is never trust big pet shops really.


----------



## Unironic Subversiveness (Oct 23, 2015)

MalWart said:


> We had gone out for dinner one night, and once we got home, one of our cats was running around the house like hell. We were absolutely unsure of what was going on. I eventually sensed a foul smell in the air. It turns out she had eaten a piece of ribbon, and her ass was paying the price.



One of our cats loved to eat curly ribbon, so birthdays, Christmas and the like were always fun times to scoop the litter box. It got so bad my mom and I would meticulously clean the room we wrapped gifts in to make sure there wasn't any ribbon to eat. Another loved to eat the cellophane off of cigarette packs when my parents still smoked. Cellophane cat taught curly ribbon cat how to run away from us before we could actually stop them from eating the shit, too.


----------



## Goofy Logic (Oct 23, 2015)

Mom was a little horrified to see one of our horses eating baling twine.  After poking around the pen, we found a few that had passed through a horse - it takes on a frayed, scrunched up look to it.  We are now way more careful about hanging onto the twine when we feed the horses.


----------



## fishercat (Oct 31, 2015)

So when my mom was little, she had a pet rabbit. They had a big outside hutch where they put him on warm days so he'd get fresh air and more room to move around while not shitting all over the floor and eating the curtains. So, he got a small cut on his cheek that none of them noticed. They put him outside, and when they came back a few hours later to fetch him, the wound was _writhing _with maggots.

They took the rabbit to the vet, who then cleaned the wound out. The maggots had gotten all the way up to the poor bun's sinuses. He ended up being fine after all the maggots were cleared out, but he had a massive pit in his face for the rest of his life. My mom was a lot more careful after that.


----------



## GRANDnumberofMULTIPLES (Nov 2, 2015)

Unironic Subversiveness said:


> One of our cats loved to eat curly ribbon, so birthdays, Christmas and the like were always fun times to scoop the litter box. It got so bad my mom and I would meticulously clean the room we wrapped gifts in to make sure there wasn't any ribbon to eat. Another loved to eat the cellophane off of cigarette packs when my parents still smoked. Cellophane cat taught curly ribbon cat how to run away from us before we could actually stop them from eating the shit, too.



My mom, who I helped get in the habit of flushing or burying her dental floss, once tossed a piece on top of the trash in her bathroom. Not even five seconds later did Bella, our fat-ass Russian Blue who was placed for adoption twice and thus has abandonment issues, slurp it down like spaghetti. My mom was terrified that it was gonna fuck up her insides or possibly kill her.

Nope. A day later she caught Bella chasing her butt only to find that she was chasing the dental floss coming out of her little kitty butthole. She had to chase down this cat who was having an absolute fucking blast being an infinite toy, an orouboros of fur and dental floss, and gently yank the dental floss out. It was a good reminder for her that small animals are like fucking toddlers.

I think my parents' dog had some kind of brain tumor. I was always a little cautious around her because my mom managed to undo all the training she had and then in the last few years of her life was incontinent, shit everywhere, and would not let me get near her. For anything. Even with food. I felt terrible because this dog was really really fucking suffering and my mom was blinded by love. The dog jumped on me when I was napping on the couch in high school and damn near bit through my lip and then when I was coming home from work I would literally have to sneak into the house so she wouldn't chase me down. There were a LOT of fights over this. Memorably the "You are so goddamn lucky I did not call animal control on this dog." 
The time came and she finally realized how quickly the dog had declined (even to the point where the dog wasn't always recognizing her or my dad) and had her euthanized. I really really wrestled with taking her myself. I don't think I would have ever been forgiven though, and I also don't think I could have wrangled her into my car short of borrowing a Redman suit from the police department.


----------



## Save Goober (Nov 2, 2015)

Wasn't sure what thread to post this in
So there's a girl in the lolita fashion community that's a lolcow, and efame hungry so is very well known in the community. She recently went on a trip overseas to Japan where she bought a bunch of souvenirs including a fucking kitten. She posts a picture of the sign showing how much the kitten costs ($970 USD) and expensive lolita brand accessories and also poses the kitten in front of bags from expensive lolita stores just so everyone know she spent a ton of money on the trip.


Spoiler: Pics of kitten
















Pretty much everyone that follows her is incredibly outraged and I'm learning more about cats and air travel and pet shops in japan then I ever really wanted to. First of all its a persian, and apparently a lot of airlines ban persians and other short nosed breeds because they have breathing problems that high up. A lot of airlines also ban kittens under 8 weeks, but it's not known how old this kitty is. And that is ANY flight, this is a 12 hour flight minimum (pretty sure it's longer) so this is going to be horrible for this cat and there is a very real chance it could be fatal.
Secondly, apparently pet shops in japan are horrible and get all their animals from mills and dispose of them if they don't sell for awhile and the conditions are terrible. So she spent almost $1000 supporting that lovely industry. All for a cat she could have easily bought in the US.
What was the point? Its speculated she just wanted a super special souvenir, and thought that buying a cat in Japan would seem cool. Otherwise, there's absolutely no fucking point.
On top of all this, she's gallivanting around Tokyo all day and leaving her brand new young kitten to stay in a hotel room by itself I guess??
Not at all thought out and a lot of people are pissed.

Update: Because of all the mean people bullying her by telling her that her kitten might, you know, _die_ if she doesn't do something, she's now flouncing from the community and deleted the anti-bullying group she made.


----------



## Surtur (Nov 2, 2015)

When I get home from work I will render unto you all the tale of the guinea pig and the fish tank


----------



## Magpie (Nov 2, 2015)

I came across a "fish tank" in Poundland that was advertised as a "large" tank. When I got home and measured the capacity of it, it was no more than two liters at the very brim of this plastic abomination. Thankfully there was only one, and I bought it for the sake of holding bits of plants that I prune out when I maintain my tank, temporarily sticking fish in (talking no more than 5 minutes here) when doing a big water change or moving stuff around, holding cleaning supplies, etc.  In doing so I also denied anyone else getting it, because holy fuck is it ever abysmal.  

It made me very sad, and it pains me to think that people will happily stick a goldfish or more in there.  There are no animals that could have a healthy life in tank like that.


----------



## Surtur (Nov 4, 2015)

Ok, so I was going to post this story in the Retail thread, but it has more to do with this and it did not happen to me anyways.

*On why some people should not have pets.*
So, a long ass fucking time ago I worked in PetSmart, because why the fuck not. Plus. I think it was the only time the reptiles ever got proper care. Anyways, I was not there this particular day but our specialty department got a phone call from a very confused (read stupid) woman who wanted to know why her guinea pig seemed so unhappy. Sam, the girl in charge that day inquired as to what was wrong.

Apparently, it did not like living in a fish tank. And no, I am not saying she put the piggie in a tank with some bedding, no this bint filled the tank with water and put the goddamn pig in it. It was ok though, she gave it a fucking floaty. Sam was of course shocked and asked her why she did this and she said the guy at PetCo said she could. Of course, the guy meant that you can convert a tank into a rodent habitat, but I don't think he was anticipating this level of stupid. I of course am getting this image in my head of this poor little pig desperately treading water, trying to stay a live while this dumb bitch stares at him slack, jawed. Despite it being purchased from PetCo we told her to bring it in and gave her a refund.

This bitch is still out there y'all.


----------



## The Knife's Husbando (Nov 4, 2015)

Surtur said:


> Ok, so I was going to post this story in the Retail thread, but it has more to do with this and it did not happen to me anyways.
> 
> *On why some people should not have pets.*
> So, a long ass fucking time ago I worked in PetSmart, because why the fuck not. Plus. I think it was the only time the reptiles ever got proper care. Anyways, I was not there this particular day but our specialty department got a phone call from a very confused (read stupid) woman who wanted to know why her guinea pig seemed so unhappy. Sam, the girl in charge that day inquired as to what was wrong.
> ...



I honest to God had to read that three times to comprehend the stupid. We really, _really_, *REALLY* need a "Stab a bitch" rating.


----------



## Surtur (Nov 4, 2015)

The Knife's Husbando said:


> I honest to God had to read that three times to comprehend the stupid. We really, _really_, *REALLY* need a "Stab a bitch" rating.



I can't rate this Feels enough


----------



## Bugaboo (Nov 4, 2015)

Surtur said:


> Ok, so I was going to post this story in the Retail thread, but it has more to do with this and it did not happen to me anyways.
> 
> *On why some people should not have pets.*
> So, a long ass fucking time ago I worked in PetSmart, because why the fuck not. Plus. I think it was the only time the reptiles ever got proper care. Anyways, I was not there this particular day but our specialty department got a phone call from a very confused (read stupid) woman who wanted to know why her guinea pig seemed so unhappy. Sam, the girl in charge that day inquired as to what was wrong.
> ...


The flying fuck


----------



## alex_theman (Nov 4, 2015)

Surtur said:


> Ok, so I was going to post this story in the Retail thread, but it has more to do with this and it did not happen to me anyways.
> 
> *On why some people should not have pets.*
> So, a long ass fucking time ago I worked in PetSmart, because why the fuck not. Plus. I think it was the only time the reptiles ever got proper care. Anyways, I was not there this particular day but our specialty department got a phone call from a very confused (read stupid) woman who wanted to know why her guinea pig seemed so unhappy. Sam, the girl in charge that day inquired as to what was wrong.
> ...


I think we have reached a new low in pet-related stupidity.


----------



## fishercat (Nov 4, 2015)

Surtur said:


> Ok, so I was going to post this story in the Retail thread, but it has more to do with this and it did not happen to me anyways.
> 
> *On why some people should not have pets.*
> So, a long ass fucking time ago I worked in PetSmart, because why the fuck not. Plus. I think it was the only time the reptiles ever got proper care. Anyways, I was not there this particular day but our specialty department got a phone call from a very confused (read stupid) woman who wanted to know why her guinea pig seemed so unhappy. Sam, the girl in charge that day inquired as to what was wrong.
> ...


How is it even possible to be this stupid? How did someone this idiotic make it to adulthood?


----------



## Bugaboo (Nov 4, 2015)

My piggies did not enjoy baths I can't imagine how a piggie floating in water with no escape would feel


----------



## fishercat (Nov 4, 2015)

Bugaboo said:


> My piggies did not enjoy baths I can't imagine how a piggie floating in water with no escape would feel


I'm amazed that the poor thing lived.

...It did live, right?


----------



## Surtur (Nov 5, 2015)

fishercat said:


> I'm amazed that the poor thing lived.
> 
> ...It did live, right?



To my knowledge


----------



## From The Uncanny Valley (Nov 5, 2015)

Surtur said:


> Ok, so I was going to post this story in the Retail thread, but it has more to do with this and it did not happen to me anyways.
> 
> *On why some people should not have pets.*
> So, a long ass fucking time ago I worked in PetSmart, because why the fuck not. Plus. I think it was the only time the reptiles ever got proper care. Anyways, I was not there this particular day but our specialty department got a phone call from a very confused (read stupid) woman who wanted to know why her guinea pig seemed so unhappy. Sam, the girl in charge that day inquired as to what was wrong.
> ...



I hope this cunt is incapable of reproduction


----------



## Surtur (Nov 5, 2015)

Uncanny Valley said:


> I hope this cunt is incapable of reproduction



As much as I agree with this, she probably popped out at least a half dozen kids.


----------



## Overcast (Nov 5, 2015)

So what did she mean by floaty? Did she fit a raft into there? Or are there guinea pig sized inner tubes I'm not aware of?


----------



## MysticMisty (Nov 5, 2015)

Surtur said:


> As much as I agree with this, she probably popped out at least a half dozen kids.


I suspect that's why she wanted the guinea pig in the first place. Especially if it was right after that awful guinea pigs as secret agents kids movie.


----------



## alex_theman (Nov 6, 2015)

MysticMisty said:


> I suspect that's why she wanted the guinea pig in the first place. Especially if it was right after that awful guinea pigs as secret agents kids movie.


G-Force? Yeah, that was pretty bad.


----------



## Surtur (Nov 6, 2015)

scorptatious said:


> So what did she mean by floaty? Did she fit a raft into there? Or are there guinea pig sized inner tubes I'm not aware of?



I wish I had an answer.


----------



## Ido (Nov 17, 2015)

Ido said:


> A few years ago my mom was a dating this guy, his three children were in their mid-twenties to early-thirties and they were all living with him, they didn't pay rent, nor did they do anything for themselves. I only really met one of them, his daughter who I'll call Bitch. Now Bitch had a Bearded Dragon so she brought him to my house one time because I have one too. Bitch brought her's in a cricket container, it was pretty big, and it's legs were blue because she used calcium sand. My beardie attacked the poor thing when I brought my laptop out (he thinks it's his) and so she put him back in the catcher before leaving an hour or so later. There house was awful, it needed to be put on hoarders or something, my god, but I went to see the poor guy and he was in the basment, a place they barely went, his cage was filthy, the only thing he had to stimulate himself with was the TV and those bastards put it on a timer so they didn't have to go down there). It came out that the daughter wasn't feeding her beardie anything but those pellets you soak in water for about half a day (usually the crickets eat them, not the beardies) and she'd leave it in for 1-3 days at a time because she had school. Both my mom and I yelled at her and begged for her to give him to us, even if ours fought with him he'd be living a much better life than he was with her, but she fucking refused and got more animals she couldn't take care of. Her dad admitted to feeling bad, said he caught a grasshopper outside and gave it to him (that pissed me off because it could have be diseased) We lost contact after bitch slapped my mom in the face, in a restaurant, in front of someone I've known and went to school with all of my life. I doubt the poor thing is alive today, I desperately want to know whats become of the poor thing, I've thought of opening contact with bitch, if only to find out, but she fucking slapped my mom and I want nothing to do with her.



I bit the bullet and contacted her, she sent me pictures. Her beardie is still around and his feet are no longer blue, in one of the pics he was out and snuggled up to her. I'm glad, at the very least it's seems he's being handled more.


----------



## Android raptor (Nov 18, 2015)

At a reptile event back in July, there was supposedly a guy who had a pygmy rattlesnake that was very stressed out, as in constantly striking the glass levels of stress. Instead of putting the snakes enclosure in a quieter place or at least putting a blanket over it so the snake could feel safer and calm down, he kept it out thinking the striking was great entertainment. Other than the fact that stress alone can make snakes very sick, striking the glass is something that could injure or even kill the snake. That's fairly basic reptile keeping knowledge, so there's a good chance he knew what to do and just chose to ignore what was best for the snake because apparently frightened animals are grade A entertainment.


----------



## Bugaboo (Nov 18, 2015)

I saw something on my facebook feed


Spoiler: Potentially Upsetting



Someone gave their snapping turtle a mouse, the snapping turtle grabs the mouse and tears it in half, nothing too bad, right? No. Then the mouse who's intestines are hanging out starts frantically swimming to the surface and I couldn't keep watching after that


Don't feed live mice/rats to animals pls, kill them or get frozen ones, as well as being cruel to the mouse you also risk the mouse biting or injuring the animal and your animal potentially getting an infection which could be life threatening and will be expensive to fix
That dude is not on my friends list anymore needless to say


----------



## Android raptor (Nov 20, 2015)

Bugaboo said:


> I saw something on my facebook feed
> 
> 
> Spoiler: Potentially Upsetting
> ...


Sometimes it is necessary to live feed reptiles I.e. they're refusing to eat otherwise, but it sounds like that guy was just being a sick fuck. Especially since I don't think snappers even need to eat mice.

On a related note, apparently seeking out snappers and killing them for fun is a somewhat popular thing to do in some places


----------



## Bugaboo (Nov 20, 2015)

Android raptor said:


> Sometimes it is necessary to live feed reptiles I.e. they're refusing to eat otherwise, but it sounds like that guy was just being a sick fuck. Especially since I don't think snappers even need to eat mice.
> 
> On a related note, apparently seeking out snappers and killing them for fun is a somewhat popular thing to do in some places


Yeah, they typically eat fish and other turtles because there aren't too many mice swimming around in a pond


----------



## Android raptor (Nov 20, 2015)

Bugaboo said:


> Yeah, they typically eat fish and other turtles because there aren't too many mice swimming around in a pond


Yeah, I looked up some care sheets. Apparently in captivity they can eat many things including mice, but I highly doubt live mice especially are something they *need*. All the care sheets listed things like worms, crayfish, shrimp, fish, meat (especially chicken), and certain plant stuff first.

I mean I could see someone throwing a prekilled rodent that got freezerburnt or something in for them since they sound like they're kinda garbage disposals, but I don't think any good owner would go out of their way to live feed since there's so many other things they'll eat.

Other than sick fucks who live feed for shits and giggles, another brand of reptile owners that can fuck off are people who feed large constructors as much as humanly possible in order to get the biggest snake they can. A lot of these snakes just end up morbidly obese, which like with anything else can cause fatal health problems. 

On the flip side are the people who underfeed large constrictors to keep them small. It does keep them small, but only because the animals are so malnourished it stunts their growth. 

It just seems like being into reptiles exposes you to so much animal cruelty and mistreatment


----------



## AnOminous (Nov 20, 2015)

Android raptor said:


> On a related note, apparently seeking out snappers and killing them for fun is a somewhat popular thing to do in some places



They're generally considered a varmint and you don't want them around.  Some people will pay to have them killed.  

It's not nice to kill them just for fun, though they make an excellent soup.


----------



## neverendingmidi (Nov 20, 2015)

I've done dog rescue, and the worst one I've personally seen was one that was covered, from head to tail, in lice. Every hair on the dog, and it was a long haired breed, had two or three things on it be it egg, larva, pupae, or adult. It was horrifying. Especially as the vet told us that an infestation like that would've taken a year or more to establish. And she was a puppy mill momma, I still cringe to think of the puppies. We took her up, gave her a bath in Rid, then took her to the vet's the next day and had her dipped and shaved right down to the skin. Then after they were dead we kept giving her baths and scrubbing with a brush to loosen the crap that remained stuck to her hair. Fortunately, dog lice aren't transferrable to humans.

Now as far as the rescue dealt with, that would either be the one that had maggots in their hotspots under matting, or the one with over 100 ticks that had to be removed. The pictures were appalling.

Also, pets turned in by the elderly had two conditions, so skinny they sometimes needed hospitalization, or so fat they were almost splitting their skins. Nothing in between.


----------



## The Knife's Husbando (Nov 20, 2015)

AnOminous said:


> They're generally considered a varmint and you don't want them around.  Some people will pay to have them killed.
> 
> It's not nice to kill them just for fun, though they make an excellent soup.



They also will try to take off a finger while you're checking your trotlines. They love catfish.


----------



## Android raptor (Nov 20, 2015)

AnOminous said:


> They're generally considered a varmint and you don't want them around.  Some people will pay to have them killed.
> 
> It's not nice to kill them just for fun, though they make an excellent soup.


I do wonder how much if that is actually justified and how much is myths/cultural biases. Venomous snakes are treated the same ways despite not really being a problem as long as you leave them alone (yes, even if you have kids since kids should be taught not to touch any strange animals and if they're too young to understand, they shouldnt be outside without close supervision) and are even beneficial since they eat rodents without also being a destructive invasive species like cats. Sauce: reptile sperg deeply immersed in the local amature and professional reptile sperg communities (in a venomous snake rich area at that). 

I seem to recall hearing from one of my reptile friends that snappers are much less of a threat than people think they are, but don't quote me since I'm super new to them and their conservation issues.

On a vaguely related note, there was recently a think where some country singer made a post on FB about how his friend was bitten by a rattler therefore it's okay to kill them whenever you see them. The pic of his friends bite, as is turned out, was actually a pic of a bite from a north African snake that didn't happen anywhere near the time he claimed his friend was supposedly bitten. 

I'm biased as fuck, but I think it's more than a little fucked to manufacture propaganda to justify and encourage animal cruelty.


----------



## AnOminous (Nov 21, 2015)

Android raptor said:


> I seem to recall hearing from one of my reptile friends that snappers are much less of a threat than people think they are, but don't quote me since I'm super new to them and their conservation issues.



They can be a huge nuisance if they get into a pond on your property.  They eat the fish you stock it with, and bits of you if you're not careful.


----------



## Magique (Nov 21, 2015)

Horrible story I had to share.

When I was about 16 years old, I used to play vidya at my friends home. He had that cute kitten he named Dark.  He was gentle, loved playing and kept jumping at the TV screen whenever we played Smash Bros.

Anyway, I was at his home. Didn't saw Dark near but I thought maybe he was sleeping.  It was when I got to his trash can that I saw that poor kitten. He was dead and smell like smoke.

So when I confronted my friend, he said he wanted to test something. He even filmed it. He fucking put Dark in his microwave and watch him as he died. He told me he loved doing " experimentation " with cats like this. And that his mother will send him a new kitten soon.

So I told him our friendship was over. Got out and told Peta about this right away. I really hope that kitten had justice.


----------



## LazarusOwenhart (Nov 22, 2015)

Magique said:


> Horrible story I had to share.
> 
> When I was about 16 years old, I used to play vidya at my friends home. He had that cute kitten he named Dark.  He was gentle, loved playing and kept jumping at the TV screen whenever we played Smash Bros.
> 
> ...


Surely telling the local Humane Society would have been more productive? PETA are basically good for two things, publicity stunts and noise making. The Humane Society can prosecute for animal cruelty.


----------



## Bugaboo (Nov 22, 2015)

Magique said:


> Horrible story I had to share.
> 
> When I was about 16 years old, I used to play vidya at my friends home. He had that cute kitten he named Dark.  He was gentle, loved playing and kept jumping at the TV screen whenever we played Smash Bros.
> 
> ...


Death via microwave is a horrible way to die.
Also I hope they tried to get a kitten from the humane society and they were all like "YO WE NEED A NEW ONE THE OLD ONE DIED RANDOMLY IN THE MICROWAVE" and they launched an investigation. But hell, they probably went out to a farm and got a free one


----------



## The Knife's Husbando (Nov 22, 2015)

Magique said:


> Horrible story I had to share.
> 
> When I was about 16 years old, I used to play vidya at my friends home. He had that cute kitten he named Dark.  He was gentle, loved playing and kept jumping at the TV screen whenever we played Smash Bros.
> 
> ...



You're a better person than I am. I'd of ended up in jail & him in the ICU.


----------



## Magique (Nov 22, 2015)

LazarusOwenhart said:


> Surely telling the local Humane Society would have been more productive? PETA are basically good for two things, publicity stunts and noise making. The Humane Society can prosecute for animal cruelty.



At that time, I thought PETA could do something.  Still don't know what happened with him.



Bugaboo said:


> Death via microwave is a horrible way to die.
> Also I hope they tried to get a kitten from the humane society and they were all like "YO WE NEED A NEW ONE THE OLD ONE DIED RANDOMLY IN THE MICROWAVE" and they launched an investigation. But hell, they probably went out to a farm and got a free one



Worse, his mother is a cat breeder. Each years, she had new kitten she loved giving to people. She doesn't even sell them.

I still feel guilty of not seeing the sign. He had too much cat who had  " run away ".


----------



## Bugaboo (Nov 22, 2015)

Doing shit like that to animals when you're young is totally a sign that something is super fucked up in your brain. That chick's gonna have a sociopathic kid on her hands and watch the fuck out when he wants to see what it's like to hurt a human.... And this lady does not seem like the type to seek help for her son's troubling behavior

What did I do wrong? I only gave him countless cats to murder!


----------



## Magique (Nov 24, 2015)

I know right? I'm just hoping he doesn't reproduce. If he can't care for a cat, what will it be with a child?


----------



## SpessCaptain (Nov 25, 2015)

Saw this on my facebook feed. A three year olds gonna learn something real important about animal care and life VERY SOON.

Also I started up my tank myself today, it's a bit bigger than that size and I'm currently treating the water - suggestions on what to buy and do next? I am thinking of a fighting fish or some neon fish.


----------



## Bugaboo (Nov 25, 2015)

Valiant said:


> Saw this on my facebook feed. A three year olds gonna learn something real important about animal care and life VERY SOON.
> 
> Also I started up my tank myself today, it's a bit bigger than that size and I'm currently treating the water - suggestions on what to buy and do next? I am thinking of a fighting fish or some neon fish.


I'm assuming you have a 10 gallon and you're cycling the water (which if done properly, will take about 3-4 weeks, many people buy a few ghost shrimp and feed them and do frequent water changes as well as weekly water tests for nitrates and ammonia, at the end of cycling both should be 0)
Once the tank is cycled you have a few stocking options
-1 male betta/Fighting Fish or 3 female bettas (must not have a power filter, a sponge filter should be used with a betta, power filters with currents can damage fins are injure swim bladders)
-3-5 neon tetras (these can be tricky and delicate, I'd skip them unless you want a challenge)
-3-5 ember tetras (hardier versions of neons)
-1-2 honey gouramis (requires a planted tank for maxium happiness)
-1-3 african dwarf frogs (a lovely choice, can live peacefully with bettas, tetras and gouramis but should be given hiding spots, it's a fully aquatic frog and requires no land areas)
-a small colony of small shrimp such as tiger shrimp or cherry shrimp (be careful, some fish may eat shrimp, check with ghost shrimp first to see if your animals will eat shrimp before spending money on more expensive shrimp)
-2-4 kuhli loaches (must be in at least pairs, social animal)
-2-4 Dwarf cories (cute little catfish guys)
-1-2Mystery Snails (these are cute and weird but require fresh veggies and cuttlebone to survive, they'll eat algae and some waste too, if you have 2 they will lay eggs above the surface, eggs can be scraped off and disposed of if you don't want to be a snail grandma)

Some of these fish may be successfully stocked together, a betta and 3 frogs, cories or loaches should get along swimmingly (heh) bettas must not be stocked with gouramis because the betta will kill the gourami, some bettas may be kept with tetras, but it does depend on the individual betta's temperment wether or not they'll be a snack.
Fancy guppies are also an option but they breed so fast you'll be up to your eyeballs in them


----------



## RV 229 (Nov 29, 2015)

Bugaboo said:


> -1 male betta/Fighting Fish or 3 female bettas (must not have a power filter, a sponge filter should be used with a betta, power filters with currents can damage fins are injure swim bladders)



Please don't keep any less than five female bettas together or keep a sorority in a tank smaller than 20 gallons. Anything less is horribly stressful for them and they may end up killing each other.


----------



## The Knife's Husbando (Nov 29, 2015)

Bugaboo said:


> I'm assuming you have a 10 gallon and you're cycling the water (which if done properly, will take about 3-4 weeks, many people buy a few ghost shrimp and feed them and do frequent water changes as well as weekly water tests for nitrates and ammonia, at the end of cycling both should be 0)
> Once the tank is cycled you have a few stocking options
> -1 male betta/Fighting Fish or 3 female bettas (must not have a power filter, a sponge filter should be used with a betta, power filters with currents can damage fins are injure swim bladders)
> -3-5 neon tetras (these can be tricky and delicate, I'd skip them unless you want a challenge)
> ...



I wish we had a _very_ informative rating. Do you work in a pet store? You should.

A few years ago, a good friend of mine who is really into fish and aquariums was sans-vehicle at the time, so she called me up and asked me for a lift someplace- _no questions asked_. Okay. this makes me a little suspicious, but no biggy- she's done me tons of favors before. So I hop in my truck and head over to her place.

I get there and she looks my truck all over, and asks me if I have anything like a brake-light out or anything else that could get us pulled over. And also, BTW- when we get to where we're going, I have to sit in the truck- with it running- while she goes into dudeman's house by herself, and we're to avoid any and all cops as we drive_ straight back to her place_. Okay. Now this makes me more than a little paranoid, so I call her out on it. I'll remember this conversation till my dying day:

Me: "Hon, if ya wanted some weed or something, all ya had to do was ask. I'd of brought it to you."
Her: "It's not drugs."
Me: "Oh, shit. Do you need a gun? Are you in trouble?"
Her: "No, it's not that either, but it's illegal, and no one else can know. I trust you hon, but look I just gotta go see this guy for a bit while you keep watch."
Me: "Wait. Are you _hooking up with this guy?!?!_ Keep in mind I'm friends with your hubby as well."
Her: "Oh, for fuck's sake. It isn't that. It's just he's kinda...a dealer."
Me: "In. What.?"
Her (annoyed): "Dammit. All it'm trying to do is buy an Apple snail. They're illegal in this state."
Me (laughing my ass off): "You're asking me to drive you to a_ fucking SNAIL RUNNER?!?_"


----------



## AlephOne2Many (Nov 29, 2015)

I have neighbors who I helped with their aging/dying Samoyed, and it crushed me and them all equally, as well as a few of the other neighbors who watch me walk her. I brushed her hair one time and I could smell the faint scent of almonds. That's a diabetic symptom. It absolutely punched me in the gut when I learned this is also a symptom of a fatal stage in diabetes with canines.

Anyways the lady of the house rescued a battered chihuahua from a shithole just around the corner from here, you know those crackerbox condominiums that all have the same industrial square shape? She also learned of a frequent customer at a Petsmart who was institutionalized over four times for neglect and abuse of over thirty cats and dogs. Sad thing is I thought of helping out at a local vet, but these horrors just... I don't know. I've dealt with a lot of fucked up realities in my life but this takes the cake.


----------



## Bugaboo (Nov 29, 2015)

The Knife's Husbando said:


> I wish we had a _very_ informative rating. Do you work in a pet store? You should.
> 
> A few years ago, a good friend of mine who is really into fish and aquariums was sans-vehicle at the time, so she called me up and asked me for a lift someplace- _no questions asked_. Okay. this makes me a little suspicious, but no biggy- she's done me tons of favors before. So I hop in my truck and head over to her place.
> 
> ...


I used to work in a pet store as a temporary thing for school, the only issue if I would work in a pet store is the blatant disregard for the lives of smaller animals like fish and crabs by a huge amount of people and even the attitude some people have about their dogs, yeah it would literally drive me insane.
After I got spider #2 I was told that tarantulas are actually illegal to own in my region. It doesn't seem to be a widely enforced law because there are a like 3 stores that sell them. The actual law is poorly worded and I think it was in reference to spiders who are dangerous to humans rather than all spiders. According to the guy I buy crickets from the only time anything would ever be said about it is if an officer from the spca came to your house and saw it, and in that event they would just tell you to be careful with the spider and not take it away.


----------



## Ido (Jun 6, 2016)

Sorry to necro the thread but shit fucking blew up. I have a headache and I'm very emotional but I need to just get it out.


Ido said:


> I had to tell a different relative not to bathe with her Bearded Dragon because that was unsanitary as fuck. The beardie now has a calcium deficiency but I will give her credit, she took him to the vet and got him the shots he needed. He's still not in the best shape, but at least she cares enough to get him proper medical care.


I took ^him off my relatives hands. The poor baby has really bad metabolic bone disease, he just started being able to move maybe a millimeter every few hours (if that, but it's something) and the only way I can get him to eat is to shove a bit of food into his mouth as he twitches. I let him soak a bit in the morning and at night, and I've been trying my best to make sure he's as comfortable as possible. I've taken him to two pet stores and a vet to get their opinions on him (I trust all the people involved), it's unlikely he'll be able to walk normally but he's improving. He's been getting better and I'm proud of the little guy, he's such a little trooper... but the relative I took him from doesn't think he's that bad, that I'm doing anything special, that she can do it better than I can, and has even told me. Multiple. Fucking. Times. 

I was gonna stop at that, I had it all typed up yesterday, I got scared off of posting but then shit hit the fan.

I'd almost lost him about five days in, I'm pretty sure the MBD and the stress of a new environment just got the best of him. I told her this, she said "Maybe it's because you took him out of my house", her house is disgusting, she has emphysema and can't even breathe in the damn thing because she never fucking cleans. She's said that she can do shit just as well as I can, when all she's done is pinch at his (by a vet's own admission) "atrophying" legs instead of working them and making him stand up on them, as well as hanging him by his front feet at the top of his cage.

She's been trying to tell me that he's been doing so well for her, he was standing and everything was fine, trying to rub it in my face that she can do what I've been doing, even though she's had him for 3 years, he's had to go in for two different rounds of calcium shots btw (and it was only after my insistence that she even took him to the vet).

My family is going through a war, everyone's fighting with each other over the stupidest of shit (this relative is in the middle of it, instigating it all) and today she texted me, called me insensitive for taking him "under the guise that she was gonna get him back" and it hurt her, he's been in her family for three years now. She claimed it not to be a money thing but when I got on the phone with her she threatened to sue me, I told her to go ahead. I told her I'd pay her for him, she said $800, I said what ever it took, she then refused. We struck up an agreement after we calmed down a bit (I was crying), I'd get to keep him for two weeks and we'd take him to the vet to let them decide.

A few hours later I decided I couldn't do, I was way too stressed, if he was just going to relapse it would be better to not have to suffer for much longer, so I called her up and told her to come get him. She brought her neighbor (who's father just passed away two days ago and shouldn't be dealing with this shit) and blamed me, "I was just starting to find a positive him being with you, but you couldn't even give me a day."

I feel like shit, but I'm done with her.


----------



## on a serious note (Jun 6, 2016)

This thread is really depressing so I'm going to add a happy post. When my dog was about four months old, he snuck up on me very, very quietly and put two perfect puncture marks in my butt. I looked like I had been bitten by some kind of ass vampire.

He's a good dog now, but those puppy teeth were _sharp._


----------



## Sailor_Jupiter (Jun 6, 2016)

The Knife's Husbando said:


> I wish we had a _very_ informative rating. Do you work in a pet store? You should.
> 
> A few years ago, a good friend of mine who is really into fish and aquariums was sans-vehicle at the time, so she called me up and asked me for a lift someplace- _no questions asked_. Okay. this makes me a little suspicious, but no biggy- she's done me tons of favors before. So I hop in my truck and head over to her place.
> 
> ...


You should use "snail runner" as your new nickname. 


Spoiler



I would.


----------



## Goofy Logic (Jun 7, 2016)

Ido said:


> Sorry to necro the thread but shit fucking blew up. I have a headache and I'm very emotional but I need to just get it out.
> 
> I took ^him off my relatives hands. The poor baby has really bad metabolic bone disease, he just started being able to move maybe a millimeter every few hours (if that, but it's something) and the only way I can get him to eat is to shove a bit of food into his mouth as he twitches. I let him soak a bit in the morning and at night, and I've been trying my best to make sure he's as comfortable as possible. I've taken him to two pet stores and a vet to get their opinions on him (I trust all the people involved), it's unlikely he'll be able to walk normally but he's improving. He's been getting better and I'm proud of the little guy, he's such a little trooper... but the relative I took him from doesn't think he's that bad, that I'm doing anything special, that she can do it better than I can, and has even told me. Multiple. Fucking. Times.
> 
> ...


Shit man, that sucks. 

You know, she's gonna blame you when it dies.  You should probably prepare for that.


----------



## Ido (Jun 7, 2016)

Goofy Logic said:


> Shit man, that sucks.
> 
> You know, she's gonna blame you when it dies.  You should probably prepare for that.


I'm well aware, I have pictures of before i got him and after, if she wants to sue me for that I have evidance of negligance.


----------



## Curt Sibling (Jun 7, 2016)

Read through this...Humanity is the worst vermin of all. (with a few nice exceptions on here)


----------



## Pinkamena Diane Pie (Jun 7, 2016)

on a serious note said:


> This thread is really depressing so I'm going to add a happy post. When my dog was about four months old, he snuck up on me very, very quietly and put two perfect puncture marks in my butt. I looked like I had been bitten by some kind of ass vampire.
> 
> He's a good dog now, but those puppy teeth were _sharp._



Teeth are nothing compared to claws. How does a dog manage to sharpen them THAT much?

A question I'm asking to this day as my dog likes to dog into people


----------



## Hades (Jun 7, 2016)

There's a Petco opening up across from the place I work at. I am not excited.

My uncle was the type of guy who used to buy animals for his kids on every holiday. However, my little cousins were absolute ruffians. Every year he bought a box of chicks on easter. Every year, in May they were buried or given away. One year he got the two kids kittens for their birthdays. They would toss them back and fourth like footballs, wizz them through the air making airplane noises and one "found their way" into the Iguana cage. These kids went through a hedgehog, sugar gliders, three geccos, two bearded dragons and a goana before my uncle started wondering why all his animals were dying.


----------



## Pinkamena Diane Pie (Jun 7, 2016)

Hades said:


> There's a Petco opening up across from the place I work at. I am not excited.
> 
> My uncle was the type of guy who used to buy animals for his kids on every holiday. However, my little cousins were absolute ruffians. Every year he bought a box of chicks on easter. Every year, in May they were buried or given away. One year he got the two kids kittens for their birthdays. They would toss them back and fourth like footballs, wizz them through the air making airplane noises and one "found their way" into the Iguana cage. These kids went through a hedgehog, sugar gliders, three geccos, two bearded dragons and a goana before my uncle started wondering why all his animals were dying.


Those kids aren't right.


----------



## waffle (Jun 7, 2016)

Pinkamena Diane Pie said:


> Those kids aren't right.


Eh, kids are dumb shits and think that just because they like something the animal will. They generally don't mean any harm, at worst they tend to not understand how much harm they are/could be doing and think they are just slightly annoying the animal.


----------



## Rabbit Bones (Jun 7, 2016)

I had a dog eat a rabbit whole, and throw it up on my rug. We didn't even try and clean it, we just rolled the rug up and threw it out


----------



## AnOminous (Jun 7, 2016)

Rabbit Bones said:


> I had a dog eat a rabbit whole, and throw it up on my rug. We didn't even try and clean it, we just rolled the rug up and threw it out



My cat recently did this with a vole.  I heard the cat puking more vigorously than usual and when I was cleaning it up, noticed there was an entire vole, in one piece, in the puke.


----------



## Rabbit Bones (Jun 7, 2016)

Mars didn't even gag or make pukey sounds. She just walked inside, went into my room, opened her mouth, and this partially rotten rabbit just _slid_ out of her throat. She was probably the best dog I've ever had, but I could have killed her. I've dealt with vile things, but that was putrid.


----------



## LazarusOwenhart (Jun 8, 2016)

Rabbit Bones said:


> Mars didn't even gag or make pukey sounds. She just walked inside, went into my room, opened her mouth, and this partially rotten rabbit just _slid_ out of her throat. She was probably the best dog I've ever had, but I could have killed her. I've dealt with vile things, but that was putrid.


Our Labradors will consume vast amounts of horse shit from our fields or if they can get it the manure heap where it's nice and rotten. You can always tell if that's been puked up anywhere in the house by the suicide inducing stench that pervades the entire property.


----------



## ActualKiwi (Jun 8, 2016)

LazarusOwenhart said:


> Our Labradors will consume vast amounts of horse shit from our fields or if they can get it the manure heap where it's nice and rotten. You can always tell if that's been puked up anywhere in the house by the suicide inducing stench that pervades the entire property.


I know that feeling. When my border collie comes back inside looking black and white and green rather than black and white, I know I'm in for a "fun" afternoon of cleaning up.


----------



## LazarusOwenhart (Jun 8, 2016)

ActualKiwi said:


> I know that feeling. When my border collie comes back inside looking black and white and green rather than black and white, I know I'm in for a "fun" afternoon of cleaning up.


One retch and my dogs go in the outside kennel until the 'fun' is over and I can just hose it all into the ditch behind the cage.


----------



## on a serious note (Jun 8, 2016)

AnOminous said:


> My cat recently did this with a vole.  I heard the cat puking more vigorously than usual and when I was cleaning it up, noticed there was an entire vole, in one piece, in the puke.


One of my cats put a mouse in my purse once.

I left the house without realizing it was in there and found it later, in public

Once at night when I was sitting outside fucking around on my iPhone my dog came up and dropped a severed rabbit head into my lap, lit ghoulishly by the light of the smartphone.


----------



## Army Burger (Jun 8, 2016)

Damn, the worst thing any of my dogs did was eat some coins or roll in random animal shit.


----------



## AnOminous (Jun 8, 2016)

LazarusOwenhart said:


> Our Labradors will consume vast amounts of horse shit from our fields or if they can get it the manure heap where it's nice and rotten. You can always tell if that's been puked up anywhere in the house by the suicide inducing stench that pervades the entire property.



That's dangerous because they give horses antiparasitic drugs that are toxic to dogs.


----------



## LazarusOwenhart (Jun 8, 2016)

AnOminous said:


> That's dangerous because they give horses antiparasitic drugs that are toxic to dogs.


We don't. They're our horses.


----------



## Pinkamena Diane Pie (Jun 8, 2016)

LazarusOwenhart said:


> Our Labradors will consume vast amounts of horse shit from our fields or if they can get it the manure heap where it's nice and rotten. You can always tell if that's been puked up anywhere in the house by the suicide inducing stench that pervades the entire property.


Should I feel glad that my dogs are too picky to eat shit. But they DO drink pee. 



Rabbit Bones said:


> I had a dog eat a rabbit whole, and throw it up on my rug. We didn't even try and clean it, we just rolled the rug up and threw it out


My dog grabbed bunnies but didn't hurt them. He grabbed two babies one time and not a scratch on them. The other time he grabbed a bigger one with fur. It was small. It screamed and he got scared so he put it down and licked it. 

His brother, however...he got it, broke it's back by mistake (he has a bigger jaw and he can't  control is as well) and dropped it trying to fix it. He didn't eat it, but he started honking for DAYS because the rabbit haunted him. Rabbit fur irritated him apparently.


----------



## Ido (Jun 8, 2016)

Ido said:


> Sorry to necro the thread but shit fucking blew up. I have a headache and I'm very emotional but I need to just get it out.
> 
> I took ^him off my relatives hands. The poor baby has really bad metabolic bone disease, he just started being able to move maybe a millimeter every few hours (if that, but it's something) and the only way I can get him to eat is to shove a bit of food into his mouth as he twitches. I let him soak a bit in the morning and at night, and I've been trying my best to make sure he's as comfortable as possible. I've taken him to two pet stores and a vet to get their opinions on him (I trust all the people involved), it's unlikely he'll be able to walk normally but he's improving. He's been getting better and I'm proud of the little guy, he's such a little trooper... but the relative I took him from doesn't think he's that bad, that I'm doing anything special, that she can do it better than I can, and has even told me. Multiple. Fucking. Times.
> 
> ...



My heart was just in pieces yesterday so I texted her about him this morning... and she told me that she was sorry, that I was right and he'd be better off with me. She's taking him to the vet tomorrow to get him checked out, I wanna hope it's just for a check up after mean-ol' Ido had him rather than something else. I assume he's stressed out again, going all the way back to her house and what not, I just hope he can hold on a little while longer. I've been texting her everything I can think of to make sure he's eating and comfortable. It's not a definite but it sounds highly likely that I might get him back, fingers crossed guys.


----------



## Lackadaisy (Jun 8, 2016)

Our Golden Retriever ate an entire bag of Hershey's Kisses, foil and all. Other than shitting the foil for the next couple of days, she was fine. She also ate an entire gingerbread house once, with the only evidence being an M&M stuck to her nose. She lived a long life too -- 15 years.


----------



## on a serious note (Jun 8, 2016)

Lackadaisy said:


> Our Golden Retriever ate an entire bag of Hershey's Kisses, foil and all. Other than shitting the foil for the next couple of days, she was fine. She also ate an entire gingerbread house once, with the only evidence being an M&M stuck to her nose. She lived a long life too -- 15 years.


A few days ago, one of the bully coated antlers I gave my dog splintered, which he inhaled of course before I could take it away from him. After a trip to the vet confirming no obstruction, they just gave him some pills and said that he would poop the shards out. (_The shards...) _

His mouth keeps writing checks that his ass can't cash.


----------



## SpacePanther (Jun 8, 2016)

My mother-in-law's dog, when she and my father-in-law were still together, brought a baby bunny in and dropped it on the arm of a chair my father-in-law was sitting on. She has also just brought in a pair of bunny ears...she likes bunnies.


----------



## RV 229 (Jun 9, 2016)

I'm frustrated with my mom for not taking her dog in to get euthanized. She keeps checking every day when the dog naps to see if she's "still breathing". The dog is deaf, has cataracts, walks like she's got bad arthritis, and spends most of her time asleep. Like, damn if you think a dog has health problems that severe, take them to a vet rather than apathetically letting them suffer to death.


----------



## Sanshain (Jun 9, 2016)

Pinkamena Diane Pie said:


> My dog grabbed bunnies but didn't hurt them. He grabbed two babies one time and not a scratch on them. The other time he grabbed a bigger one with fur. It was small. It screamed and he got scared so he put it down and licked it.
> 
> His brother, however...he got it, broke it's back by mistake (he has a bigger jaw and he can't  control is as well) and dropped it trying to fix it. He didn't eat it, but he started honking for DAYS because the rabbit haunted him. Rabbit fur irritated him apparently.



Huge dogs can have surprisingly gentle jaws. We keep chickens and have two large dogs, an Alsatian-type and a Newfoundland cross. The former ignores roosters, but is _utterly fascinated_ by hens. He quite frequently tries to sniff or lick them, with no apparent malice. Fortunately they're also an incredibly laid back breed, and thus don't panic when a giant dog tries to put a paw on them.

We also had a Rottweiler years ago who once decided to grab a three-week-old chick in her mouth. And by 'grab' I mean 'completely engulf to the point we were certain she'd swallowed it'. Then we yelled at her, and she opened her mouth and it just fell out again, completely unharmed. This same dog used to hoard eggs as well, and could easily carry two in her mouth at once from one place to another, without so much as cracking their shells.


----------



## Rabbit Bones (Jun 9, 2016)

Mars was massive... she was some kind of chow mix and she weighed about 120 pounds. Apart from the time she ate a dead rabbit and yacked it up, she was so gentle. She'd try and catch birds and squirrels, but once she had them she had no idea what to do with them. She got a squirrel one night, and just stood there whimpering while it scratched her mouth up and freaked out. I had to pry her mouth open to make her drop the squirrel, and she was _so_ happy it was gone. I miss her.


----------



## ActualKiwi (Jun 9, 2016)

Rabbit Bones said:


> Mars was massive... she was some kind of chow mix and she weighed about 120 pounds. Apart from the time she ate a dead rabbit and yacked it up, she was so gentle. She'd try and catch birds and squirrels, but once she had them she had no idea what to do with them. She got a squirrel one night, and just stood there whimpering while it scratched her mouth up and freaked out. I had to pry her mouth open to make her drop the squirrel, and she was _so_ happy it was gone. I miss her.


Yeah, with a lot of dogs they just love the whole chasing-things bit, and have zero idea of what they're supposed to do once they've actually caught what they're chasing, because then the fun stops.


----------



## Pinkamena Diane Pie (Jun 9, 2016)

Forever Sunrise said:


> Huge dogs can have surprisingly gentle jaws. We keep chickens and have two large dogs, an Alsatian-type and a Newfoundland cross. The former ignores roosters, but is _utterly fascinated_ by hens. He quite frequently tries to sniff or lick them, with no apparent malice. Fortunately they're also an incredibly laid back breed, and thus don't panic when a giant dog tries to put a paw on them.
> 
> We also had a Rottweiler years ago who once decided to grab a three-week-old chick in her mouth. And by 'grab' I mean 'completely engulf to the point we were certain she'd swallowed it'. Then we yelled at her, and she opened her mouth and it just fell out again, completely unharmed. This same dog used to hoard eggs as well, and could easily carry two in her mouth at once from one place to another, without so much as cracking their shells.


^^
The more retriever of the two has actually been able to carry things without cracking or harming the animal. (Like the bunnies)  Meanwhile, the other, despite killing animals a lot by mistake, he's pretty much controlled in every other aspect unless you ignore him, then he'll paw you hard on purpose. He can take food from people so gently and he doesn't try using his claws. He just does cause he's a little (fat). The other can't control his paws or teeth for anything but animals.


----------



## LazarusOwenhart (Jun 9, 2016)

ActualKiwi said:


> Yeah, with a lot of dogs they just love the whole chasing-things bit, and have zero idea of what they're supposed to do once they've actually caught what they're chasing, because then the fun stops.


We used to have a pair of Jack Russell Terriers. One could hunt and chase and catch like a real pro but would instantly drop anything she caught and run away at the speed of light. The other couldn't hunt or chase but she was a motherfucking stone cold killer. This dog would disembowel rats alive then swing them by their entrails just to hear them shriek with pain. You put the two of them in a rat infested barn together and it looked like somebody was feeding rats through a woodchipper.


----------



## ActualKiwi (Jun 9, 2016)

LazarusOwenhart said:


> We used to have a pair of Jack Russell Terriers. One could hunt and chase and catch like a real pro but would instantly drop anything she caught and run away at the speed of light. The other couldn't hunt or chase but she was a motherfucking stone cold killer. This dog would disembowel rats alive then swing them by their entrails just to hear them shriek with pain. You put the two of them in a rat infested barn together and it looked like somebody was feeding rats through a woodchipper.


Understandable really, given they were one of the big ratter breeds


----------



## LazarusOwenhart (Jun 9, 2016)

ActualKiwi said:


> Understandable really, given they were one of the big ratter breeds


Still are, the guy we bought our latest from runs a rat-pack.


----------



## Ido (Jun 9, 2016)

Ido said:


> My heart was just in pieces yesterday so I texted her about him this morning... and she told me that she was sorry, that I was right and he'd be better off with me. She's taking him to the vet tomorrow to get him checked out, I wanna hope it's just for a check up after mean-ol' Ido had him rather than something else. I assume he's stressed out again, going all the way back to her house and what not, I just hope he can hold on a little while longer. I've been texting her everything I can think of to make sure he's eating and comfortable. It's not a definite but it sounds highly likely that I might get him back, fingers crossed guys.


I still don't know if I'm getting him back but she is considering it and knows that the only way I'll take him is if she relinquishes him to me. I really don't want to go through that shit again. I do know that he is going to be getting calcium shots over the course of the next few weeks. She said the vet sounded positive, I'm still worried because I'm a worrywart but I'm just glad his vet is involved. Also, the two vets he's been to have said he still has a few years left in him, he hasn't given up yet.

I probably won't post about this again until it's decided if I get him back or not, or shit hits the fan again. Only time will tell.


----------



## on a serious note (Jun 9, 2016)

Forever Sunrise said:


> Huge dogs can have surprisingly gentle jaws. We keep chickens and have two large dogs, an Alsatian-type and a Newfoundland cross. The former ignores roosters, but is _utterly fascinated_ by hens. He quite frequently tries to sniff or lick them, with no apparent malice. Fortunately they're also an incredibly laid back breed, and thus don't panic when a giant dog tries to put a paw on them.
> 
> We also had a Rottweiler years ago who once decided to grab a three-week-old chick in her mouth. And by 'grab' I mean 'completely engulf to the point we were certain she'd swallowed it'. Then we yelled at her, and she opened her mouth and it just fell out again, completely unharmed. This same dog used to hoard eggs as well, and could easily carry two in her mouth at once from one place to another, without so much as cracking their shells.


A good retriever should be able to carry an egg in its mouth and not break it.


----------



## Funnybone (Jun 9, 2016)

when I was a kid a massive eel-like fish (possibly an eel) jumped out of it's tank at PetSmart and started flapping around. The flapping was so fucking loud and violent
none of the workers did anything and were like running the fuck away from it
My dad grabbed it and put it back in the tank-- we got a free goldfish because of that lol
traumatized me tho


----------



## AnOminous (Jun 9, 2016)

Forever Sunrise said:


> Huge dogs can have surprisingly gentle jaws.



Dogs use jaws like we use hands.


----------



## Lasoona (Jun 10, 2016)

My old-ass 14 year old dog eats her own poop and then vomits it. A fight to the death is then initated between her and my other dog for the rights to eat the poop-vomit.


----------



## LazarusOwenhart (Jun 10, 2016)

Lasoona said:


> My old-ass 14 year old dog eats her own poop and then vomits it. A fight to the death is then initated between her and my other dog for the rights to eat the poop-vomit.


General rule with dogs is that their definition of deliciousness directly correlates with our level of disgust.


----------



## Goofy Logic (Jun 10, 2016)

Years ago, our four schipperkes had a attraction to chicken shit. Thier breath was horrible.

One time when a chicken got out, they chased it down, pinned it to the ground and sniffed it's butt.  When they realized it wasn't going to shit for them, they let it go.

Then when we adopted a cat, one of the skips found out about the litterbox...


----------



## Checkered Spotlight (Jun 14, 2016)

I live in a shitty little town in a shitty little state. And in that shitty little town is a shitty little mall. One day I went into that mall, and was window shopping. Well, I notice a pet store. I like animals and decide to take a look.

It was horrible. Big dogs in tiny cages, they were filthy and whimpering, they didn't cover the metal bottom of the cage on the top level so it was cutting their feet.

Nasty shit. It got closed down recently, I think, though.


----------



## From The Uncanny Valley (Jun 17, 2016)

Checkered Spotlight said:


> I live in a shitty little town in a shitty little state. And in that shitty little town is a shitty little mall. One day I went into that mall, and was window shopping. Well, I notice a pet store. I like animals and decide to take a look.
> 
> It was horrible. Big dogs in tiny cages, they were filthy and whimpering, they didn't cover the metal bottom of the cage on the top level so it was cutting their feet.
> 
> Nasty shit. It got closed down recently, I think, though.



Was it a Debbie's Petland, perchance?


----------



## Checkered Spotlight (Jun 17, 2016)

Uncanny Valley said:


> Was it a Debbie's Petland, perchance?



No, not that I remember. It was something like "Family Pets" or something? A very, very generic name that I can't remember.


----------



## From The Uncanny Valley (Jun 17, 2016)

Checkered Spotlight said:


> No, not that I remember. It was something like "Family Pets" or something? A very, very generic name that I can't remember.



That sounds familiar too.


----------



## Checkered Spotlight (Jun 17, 2016)

Uncanny Valley said:


> That sounds familiar too.



Maybe it's like I said and just a generic "brand" name? Sort of like the many variations on Stop 'n' Go, I guess. It's nonspecific enough that it could be anywhere.

Either that or we live in the same area and I never knew it. 

It just breaks my heart to see animals treated like that. They're living things too. They may not be able to speak to us with words but you shouldn't cram them into little spaces like that and let them die.


----------



## From The Uncanny Valley (Jun 17, 2016)

Luckily nearly all mall pet stores in my area have been shut down for years.


----------



## Overcast (Jun 18, 2016)

I like how this thread went from animals living in horrible conditions to mostly stories about people's pets eating poop or messing with other animals.

Not that I mind.


----------



## MW 002 (Jul 22, 2016)

So I have another horse industry horror story to share

A few years ago I worked at a large scale breeding farm which was pretty much what I'd call a foal-mill. They bred hundreds of horses every year and would auction off a lot of the yearlings to unspecified places. 

Anyways so we had a HUGE outbreak of rotavirus, for those who don't know what it is: http://www.aaep.org/info/rotaviral-diarrhea from although it may not sound like a huge deal, it killed a good handful of foals one year mainly from staff ignorance/management incompetence. Also due to the lack of bio security practices, the virus ended up spreading way further than it should have.

Something about watching newborns die on a near daily basis really fucked me up- to the point that I was becoming severely depressed working there. Didn't help that there was a huge staff turnover rate, since many of them leave due to being unable to handle getting screamed at by the barn manager on a daily basis.

I ended up quitting after being forced to grab a mare refusing to leave her dead foal's side; with chain and all because the foals death was not quite registered to the Mama Mare. Just seeing her run around the paddock and screaming hysterically was among one of the more heartbreaking parts of the job.


----------



## LagoonaBlue (Jul 22, 2016)

Venus said:


> So I have another horse industry horror story to share
> 
> A few years ago I worked at a large scale breeding farm which was pretty much what I'd call a foal-mill. They bred hundreds of horses every year and would auction off a lot of the yearlings to unspecified places.
> 
> ...



As a former horse owner that gave me feels.

Anyway, on topic - not long after my mum got her current dog (a jack russell/schnauzer mix) the dog ate a wasp.  AFAIK it was the first time she'd seen a wasp - from what I remember someone had left a window open and it flew into the kitchen only for the dog to eat it.  It stung her on the inside of her mouth and left her in a lot of discomfort.  It also made her drowsy and my mum was panicking, thinking she was going to lose the dog.  She called up the vets and explained what happened, and I cannot remember the advice they gave her other than that she was to give the dog antihistamines. 

Luckily she recovered.


----------



## omori (Jul 22, 2016)

Some years ago my family adopted a minipoodle mix from some friends. They in turn had rescued the little thing from a family that had bought her from a breeder and gave her to their daughter. Said daughter had a baby and all of the family's attention went from their new puppy to the baby, leading up to having the dog put away in the bathroom for most of the day. She's six now, very nervous at times, and absolutely dislikes being behind closed doors particularly bathrooms even if its for something temporary like baths.


----------



## MW 002 (Jul 29, 2016)

-Another horse story-

The employer I mentioned earlier also had a tendency to tranq all of her horses for just about everything because she saw it as a replacement for training.


----------



## Magique (Jul 29, 2016)

I think I'll vent here.

There's someone in my town that loves putting his dog outside when it's -35 celcius. The dog stays all night there and I heard him doing thoses noice of pain. When I told him ( please, your dog is hurting when you leave him outside like that. ), he's saying: '' But he's happy when he sees me in the morning.'' '' Dog can take that kind of cold. Don't tell me what to do. ''

Just fuck.


----------



## Urban Superstition (Jul 29, 2016)

...What?
Of course he's happy to see him in the morning after being left outside in the freezing cold.
I don't understand the thought processes of some people.


----------



## Lalala (Jul 29, 2016)

So I have a friend, let's just call her....Dumbfuck. Now Dumbfuck lives in a house where the back garden can't be more than 5 feet from a children's playground. Dumbfuck also likes to be 'unique' so she decided to buy a tarantula, specifically a Red Kneed Mexican and a female no less, despite me and a bud warning her they have a long life span. For about a year all is well, she of course gets others to help feed it and clean it's tank cos she doesnt want to but hell it's healthy and she likes to look at it.
Enter Dumbfuck getting knocked up. She decides that having a tarantula around wouldn't be safe with a baby, a misinformed but nonetheless mature decision. So does she sell it or try to rehome it?
Ohhh no. 8 months before the baby is even due Dumbfuck releases the T into her back garden mere feet away from a kiddy park. That poor thing was either immediately eaten, wandered into the park and squished or wandered into the park, bit someone and THEN was squished.
But hey she's gonna have a baby so hey, a new pet to show off.
(Sorry found out about this earlier today and I am beyond pissed off, would have gladly taken her in but when I went to my friend's garden I couldn't find her )


----------



## Bugaboo (Jul 30, 2016)

Lalala said:


> So I have a friend, let's just call her....Dumbfuck. Now Dumbfuck lives in a house where the back garden can't be more than 5 feet from a children's playground. Dumbfuck also likes to be 'unique' so she decided to buy a tarantula, specifically a Red Kneed Mexican and a female no less, despite me and a bud warning her they have a long life span. For about a year all is well, she of course gets others to help feed it and clean it's tank cos she doesnt want to but hell it's healthy and she likes to look at it.
> Enter Dumbfuck getting knocked up. She decides that having a tarantula around wouldn't be safe with a baby, a misinformed but nonetheless mature decision. So does she sell it or try to rehome it?
> Ohhh no. 8 months before the baby is even due Dumbfuck releases the T into her back garden mere feet away from a kiddy park. That poor thing was either immediately eaten, wandered into the park and squished or wandered into the park, bit someone and THEN was squished.
> But hey she's gonna have a baby so hey, a new pet to show off.
> (Sorry found out about this earlier today and I am beyond pissed off, would have gladly taken her in but when I went to my friend's garden I couldn't find her )


Female Mexican Red Knees can live up to 30 years, also if you buy a spider and you won't fucking feed it or touch it you have no business owning a spjder. Mexican Red Knees are also one of the most docile tarantula species and are not dangerous to humans (not taranutla can kill a human, even a child)
I see a lot of cases of retards buying tarantulas to be cool and not because they have an appreciation for the animal


----------



## Lalala (Jul 30, 2016)

Bugaboo said:


> Female Mexican Red Knees can live up to 30 years, also if you buy a spider and you won't fucking feed it or touch it you have no business owning a spjder. Mexican Red Knees are also one of the most docile tarantula species and are not dangerous to humans (not taranutla can kill a human, even a child)
> I see a lot of cases of exceptional individuals buying tarantulas to be cool and not because they have an appreciation for the animal


Believe it or not it was actually a relief when she got a Red Knee, she originally had her sights set on something like a Cobalt Blue or an Antilles Pink Toe (have you guessed it yet? Yep her 'research' was pretty much to google 'colourful  tarantula') at least Red Knees are docile enough that if it got out it wasn't gonna dart away forever or take a chunk out of her although now I kinda wish she had bought a Blue if only so when it was released it would turn back around and munch her toes before running off.


----------



## trashpanda (Aug 2, 2016)

There is a Petco I use to poke my head in because they had more ferret accessories than Petsmart. The condition of the store use to be decent but in the past year it's like the whole staff just said "fuck it."

You can almost smell the ammonia from animal urine outside the store.

The ferrets have diarrhoea from still eating Marshall mush despite being old enough to eat solids.  They also have fleas. All the small mammals they sell do, actually.

They even neglect the feeder insects. In March I found "crickets to go" boxes that had literally been sitting there since December (they had the shipping date on them). The crickets that they bag were near death and lethargic.

Needless to say, I stick to Petsmart for feeder insects and the internet for other pet needs.


----------



## toulouse (Aug 3, 2016)

So around closing a few days ago, I had a dad come in with his kid and their little dog, like a shih-tzu or something. The dog looked _terrible. _His eyes were closed and kind of crusty, his nose was dry, labored breathing, and every so often he whimpered like he was in pain. Kid is near tears and said he'd been like this all day, that he wouldn't eat or drink or move. It was awful.

The dad asked if I knew what was wrong with the dog. I said no, but this dog needs to go to the vet _urgently_. There's some emergency vet clinics in the area, and I offer to give them some addresses. Dad says no, asks for an employee that would know how to help the dog. I tell him none of us are vets, and this dog needs to see one right away.

Dad brushes me off and wanders over to our first aid section, picks out a bottle of dog aspirin and figures that's good enough, I guess, so he buys it and goes on his merry way.

I really hope they eventually took him to the vet.


----------



## omori (Aug 3, 2016)

Damn I just remembered the time my mom almost killed the dog we took in because of her stubbornness. Might be a bit long cause it pisses me off to this day. 

One morning we wake up and Daisy is vomiting every half hour at a near constant rate; she's shivery and ahe refuses to eat or drink between, shit was fucking frightening and I could tell she needed to see a vet right away. So I tell my mom.

She goes on about how the dog might have a stomach bug and how it'll go away and if she really needs to see a vet we'll take her the next day and heads out to work despite me insisting that this isnt something that seems like it should be put off. I end up staying home to look after her.

Sure enough during the day she gets worse. She's spewing like no little dog her size should, she's extremely lethargic, and I'm wrapping my her up in a blanket in my arms ignoring her throwing up on me because her body temperature has dropped severely. I call my mom at her work and tell her to stop pussyfooting cause this dog is gonna fucking die over her stubborness to pay for a vet check up.

So she gets off early and we finally take the dog to the vet. It turns out that Daisy ingested some cleaning solution that my mom had standing around and that if we put off taking her in a few hours more she would've been dead from dehydration alone. She stayed there for a couple of days to get her stomach pumped and stabilized.

This was about four years ago. Little girl's a ok now but I get on my mom whenever i feel like there's something seriously up woth our pets.


----------



## Chubby_Penguin (Aug 3, 2016)

One of our previous neighbors (back when I was a kid) would leave their dog outside all the time. We'd hear it barking and howling at night. It had a dog house and presumably was fed, but that was all the attention it got.

I know it was one of those cases where the kids begged for a dog and promise to take care of it because when they first got him I was the kids washing him up outside and playing. As soon as they got bored of him the dog was left alone. I think my dad tried talking to them once but was brushed off.


----------



## Rabbit Bones (Aug 3, 2016)

Went to petco yesterday and there was a tortoise in the turtle display. I had to explain to them the difference between a tortoise and a turtle  I almost bought the poor thing for fear of its life.


----------



## Ido (Oct 8, 2016)

Ido said:


> Sorry to necro the thread but shit fucking blew up. I have a headache and I'm very emotional but I need to just get it out.
> 
> I took ^him off my relatives hands. The poor baby has really bad metabolic bone disease, he just started being able to move maybe a millimeter every few hours (if that, but it's something) and the only way I can get him to eat is to shove a bit of food into his mouth as he twitches. I let him soak a bit in the morning and at night, and I've been trying my best to make sure he's as comfortable as possible. I've taken him to two pet stores and a vet to get their opinions on him (I trust all the people involved), it's unlikely he'll be able to walk normally but he's improving. He's been getting better and I'm proud of the little guy, he's such a little trooper... but the relative I took him from doesn't think he's that bad, that I'm doing anything special, that she can do it better than I can, and has even told me. Multiple. Fucking. Times.
> 
> ...





Ido said:


> I still don't know if I'm getting him back but she is considering it and knows that the only way I'll take him is if she relinquishes him to me. I really don't want to go through that shit again. I do know that he is going to be getting calcium shots over the course of the next few weeks. She said the vet sounded positive, I'm still worried because I'm a worrywart but I'm just glad his vet is involved. Also, the two vets he's been to have said he still has a few years left in him, he hasn't given up yet.
> 
> I probably won't post about this again until it's decided if I get him back or not, or shit hits the fan again. Only time will tell.



Well, after months of not talking to her I finally swallowed my pride and asked her how he was doing and it turns out the poor little guy passed away from an infection a few weeks ago.

RIP little buddy, you will be missed.


----------



## DespotCTM (Oct 20, 2016)

The worst kind of petowners are the ones that get a pet just to show it off to others (and then post the "omg i luv him so much happy birthday to my cute dog" on facebook)

Unfortunately that type of owner is my little sister who wanted a dog because she felt lonely being home alone (she still lives with my mother and I had moved out years ago because they're both insufferable bitches) and mother worked all day so a cute puppy would help her ease that "totes super loneliness" right?


Spoiler



Wrong, she still went to school and shit and somehow thought a shihtzu/maltese mix puppy would be a-okay being home alone.

She went to pick it up with me and I had told her it would be stressed from the travel and the new environment and to let him explore the home (and get used to her) in peace and not to invite people over to show him off to for at least the first few days. So of course she is like "yeah suuure I know" but is dumb enough to post on facebook the picture where you can see her friend's hand AND her 2/3 year old touching the dog.

She also lived with me for a month or 2 because mommy dearest told her to go the fuck back to school and not neglect her dog by going partying a lot and coming home in the buttcrack of the morning (6AM). I can count on one hand the times she was at home taking care of her dog and instead of disappearing all day to hang out with friends and on the other hand the times she took this puppy of 4/5 months with her to a BBQ all day in the sweltering-crack-of-Satan's heatwave where the poor thing would have no way to rest/food/water for up to hours.

Worst thing is that I spend more time with that little hairball that when he's scared he'll come to me to just hold him because she can't be bothered.

She also used to take away his water and food at around 20:00 because "he might drink and pee in the house" just wtf



TL;DR: sister got a puppy just to show it off to friends and proclaim on facebook totes of an animal lover she is praise me for being such a wonderful person


----------



## AnOminous (Oct 20, 2016)

Chimerian Godhead said:


> The worst kind of petowners are the ones that get a pet just to show it off to others (and then post the "omg i luv him so much happy birthday to my cute dog" on facebook)



That bitch Alison Rapp is one of those.  So is John Flynt.  You know, the kind who buy some fashionable breed, ignoring that they have known behavioral or health issues.  So you end up with freaks like this putting a tiny dog on a choke collar because they're too sociopathically lacking in empathy even to train a damn dog.


----------



## Bugaboo (Oct 20, 2016)

A co-worker told me she had an discussion/borderline arguement with a petsmart employee over the conditions the chameleons are kept in. The employee knew nothing about them and they were displaying signs of stress. After the discussion she had a bunch of shit in her cart and she nope'd the fuck out and left the cart with like 500 dollars of reptile supplies in it


----------



## SpessCaptain (Oct 20, 2016)

Ah yes.. I think my friend is one of those. She had a pet bird for about 6 months before it passed away (no diagnosis) and talked about how she was training to have it make r2d2 sounds and other nerdy things. It was named Gandalf and she was trying to teach it to say "Fly you fools" for epic facebook stickers.

 She would always repost the dead bird on facebook for sympathy and one day got a new bird, Baggins this time. Well suffice to say she posted her replacement for a couple of weeks and then softly dropped the bird off of her page. I think the bird died and shes refusing to acknowledge it because then she seems like a bad owner.

Now she's moved onto mammals, got a rabbit now.


----------



## DespotCTM (Oct 20, 2016)

Valiant said:


> Ah yes.. I think my friend is one of those. She had a pet bird for about 6 months before it passed away (no diagnosis) and talked about how she was training to have it make r2d2 sounds and other nerdy things. It was named Gandalf and she was trying to teach it to say "Fly you fools" for epic facebook stickers.
> 
> She would always repost the dead bird on facebook for sympathy and one day got a new bird, Baggins this time. Well suffice to say she posted her replacement for a couple of weeks and then softly dropped the bird off of her page. I think the bird died and shes refusing to acknowledge it because then she seems like a bad owner.
> 
> Now she's moved onto mammals, got a rabbit now.



I have a feeling that those people post "happy birthday to my -insert family member who doesn't have social media- ily" on their facebook (but can't be arsed to call or visit said relative) are one and the same.

Aka attention whores for asspats


----------



## ulsterscotsman (Oct 23, 2016)

Bugaboo said:


> I think declawing cats just cause people don't want to get scratched or have their furniture clawed up should be an illegal. I know 2 people who have declawed cats and I just don't understand. If you can't take the claws, why get the cat? Like I used to get pinched by hermit crabs (well, just 1 of them was the big offended) all the time and I just deal with it because that's what they do and it comes with the package.
> 
> Speaking of cutting of things that shouldn't be cut off, I want to punch people right in the nuts who de-fang their tarantulas. Because of the nature of the spider's digestive system it can only eat liquid so when it catches it's prey it injects venom from it's fangs to liquify the insides and then it drinks them, with the fangs gone the animal physically cannot eat. If you can't accept that if you own tarantulas, sooner or later you will be bitten, perhaps a tarantula is not the right animal for you. Some pet stores do this to the tarantulas they sell and it just boggles the mind.
> 
> ...


Can never understand how it's legal to sell those Crab torture devices aka "starter kits".


----------



## UnfortunateInsect (Oct 30, 2016)

I've never worked there but once upon a time I was looking into getting a reptile so I thought I'd hit up a local shop. The following are a series of reviews and personal encounters that accurately describe what hell had run loose there. I'd post pictures of his store but he prohibits any being taken (I wonder why).



Spoiler: Enter the madness



"Horrible treatment of animals they had a full-grown beard a dragon and a Tupperware container so small that animal literally could not move."
"Most of the cages were covered in dried feces which had been there so long it was white and caked. Most of the animals had bone dry water dishes. Some had moldy bedding. There was a rotten mouse in one of the snake cages. A lot of the animals were too large for their enclosures. "
"I've been to the location in columbus several times. It's disgusting. The animals are kept horribly, most are skinny and half the animals there are illegal including the alligators that free roam the store and big constrictors that he doesn't have permits for."



He was attacked by one of his pythons and thankfully, we got a photo of the conditions he keeps it in, notice the bloodstains in the cage. I've also attached an image of a "Healthy" snake he sold to someone. Spoilering both of them cause the content can be unnerving.


Spoiler: Cage Pictures














Spoiler: "Healthy" snake


----------



## ChristmasDuck (Nov 1, 2016)

I guess they're not great stories, but some of my family have some 'interesting' attitudes towards animals.

My uncle had a bigass German Shepherd, it was his third one (he has another now). The entire household used traditional methods to train the dog - that is to say, beating it for various things and mostly keeping it outside. It was a vicious motherfucker that did NOT get along with any neighborhood dogs (surprise, surprise), so they mostly kept it muzzled. Anyway, one of their neighbors had a pet wolf (or half wolf?). I don't know what the neighbor did to him, but this creature was deranged. He was wandering out on his own at one point, no owner in sight. He jumped my uncle's dog. They started really tearing into each other until my aunt threw cold water at them and my uncle kept the wolf at bay with a pitchfork until the neighbor arrived. The neighbor was pissed at my uncle for his 'crazy dog', acting as though hers was some perfect angel, totally ignoring that he was just randomly out of the yard and attacked unprovoked. From what I know, my aunt and uncle are raising the new dog in the same way - when me and my dad arrived at their house some years ago, their dog bolted towards the fence, almost jumping over it, snarling, barking, pretty much foaming at the mouth until she was yelled at.

Another aunt of mine owns (or maybe owned - I was much younger) a Rough Collie. Beautiful dog, coat kept in immaculate condition. However, nobody in the household seemed to really care about his whereabouts - they'd sometimes leave the back gate open, he'd just wander off onto nearby streets/roads. This was treated as perfectly normal. They also didn't bother training him - he'd often jump up on people, try to snatch food from the table and ignored any commands. However, the biggest problem was with barking. He'd just bark non stop. When they hosted a family reunion, she'd just lock him in the basement for the whole duration. Apparently that was also normal.

Not long before I was born, my mom bought a Dachshund on impulse, got bored of him, palmed him off onto my dad, who didn't want a dog. However, he also hates the idea of animals suffering and my mom wouldn't let him sell it, so he took good care of it. When I was born, he deemed a dog 'too dirty', so gave it to my grandparents. My grandma loved it TOO much. Before it died, it was obese, covered in weird growths and had spinal problems. My mom also pulled this shit two more times - she randomly came home one day with budgies she had no clue how to care for, tried to put responsibility on 7 year old me... it ended with my dad, who soon after sold them. Years later, after their divorce, she impulse bought the cutest black Shar-Pei pup... while working in a hospital lab full time. She neglected it to all hell before her husband convinced her to sell it.

On the lighter side of things, there was a cat of another uncle that remained kitten-like in very old age. He was kinda ugly - messy fur (it seemed to just go that way, he was brushed often), bug eyes, nasty brown stuff where his teeth used to be, couldn't put his tongue back into his mouth so it looked kinda like dried out ham. This 15 year old cat would always just bounce around the apartment, hunt for his own tail, was utterly fascinated by the cuckoo clock and chased my laser pointer around for about half an hour before getting distracted by something else. Died a year later. I miss that cat.


----------



## Purple People Eater (Nov 1, 2016)

-I'll never forget one year at summer camp it was raining and I tagged along with a group of kids in the woods to go look for frogs. It was fun for a while, we had only caught one or two but we were just holding and looking at them, pretending we knew what species they were to try and impress one another. Then one boy demands to see the frog I'm holding. I give it to him and he says "Watch this!" and, I shit you not, _slams _the frog onto the riverbank. Onto a rock. Needless to say it died instantly, broke open, and made the most sickening sound I've ever heard. Even ten years later it still disturbs me to think about.

-An aunt of mine used to own two big border collies, and it always made me so sad to see how she was keeping them. They were rescues already (they'd been locked in a dark basement for most of their lives with little food or water) but my aunt was kind of old and just not capable of properly caring for her dogs. She overfed them until they were obese, and she never trimmed their fur; it was always grimy and made them look even bigger. They had a big yard to run around in but they were lethargic from being buried under all that fur as well as being overweight.

-I grew up with a close family member who has autism, and he had an assistance dog. A sweet little spaniel who loved people. His parents bought the dog from a reputable breeder and sent him away to be trained; the dog's job was essentially to calm the boy down whenever he got overstimulated and had a meltdown. Usually meltdowns were prompted by thunderstorms, so whenever the weather got ominous they would send the dog over to the boy and he would sit in his lap. No big deal, right? Well this kid was mercilessly rough with his dog. He was on the higher-functioning end of the spectrum, and totally capable of being gentle with other living things, especially when told by his parents. His parents never set boundaries like that though, and the dog went through all kinds of torture. The boy would hold the dog on his lap and laugh when he struggled and yelped trying to get away, flip him on his back and hold all of his legs in one hand like he was being hog-tied, slap him on the top of his head because "that's the softest part of his fur", pull the skin on his face back so he "looks chinese", all sorts of horrible shit that this sweet puppy did not deserve. I reached out to his parents about the way the dog was being treated and they insisted the dog was just doing his job and he had been trained to put up with it. I'm sure he has a higher tolerance for shenanigans, but there's a point where it's just unacceptable. To top it all off none of them kept up with the assistance dog training, so now he's just a traumatized housepet who wants affection but is incredibly hand-shy.

-Most of my childhood and teenage years were spent competitively riding horses, and I've seen far too many little girls and families way in over their heads who've leased ponies and have no idea how to take care of them. Ponies with overgrown coats caked with shit in the summer being put into the ring, little kids yanking them around the showgrounds, or parents making their kids show horses that are clearly to big or hot-tempered for them to handle, endangering the safety of everyone else showing alongside them. Plus crazy trainers chewing out their riders for placing less than first and beating horses to get them to stop spooking (spoiler: that doesn't work). This sport is largely female-dominated, and it's as much of a catty mess as a dance competition. God forbid you try to help someone with their horse, lest you be accused of sabotage.


----------



## MalWart (Nov 2, 2016)

We briefly owned a dog (her name was Fergie) back in the spring of 2010. The organization in which we adopted from insisted that she was a Pointer/Labrador mix. She had been making some noise one night, so my mother came to see what was going on. Fergie came up to her and nearly bit into her neck, which could've killed her if she dug in deep.

After that incident, we returned her. We came to the conclusion that she had traces of pit bull in her (she even had a few physical traits that hinted towards it) and that the adoption organization pawned her off as the aforementioned Pointer/Labrador mix just so potential adopters wouldn't be put off by the stigma attached with pit bulls.


----------



## Kylie Raina (Nov 26, 2018)

Pet stores are downright HORRIBLE at giving animal-related advice. If you ask them something that should be common sense about an animal, they still manage to get it wrong. As a result, people are buying shitty plastic prisons for their hamsters, putting bettas in bowls with no filter, and sticking rabbits in cages. I’m glad that Petsmart and Petco stopped selling rabbits bc if they didnt, i couldnt imagine what deplorable conditions ppl would be putting them in. I’ve also noticed that pet stores don’t sell any hamster cages that are actually adequate for hamsters. Its disturbing and it shows that pet stores’ real motives are profit and not the well being of animals. The best thing you can really do is educate the consumers bc unfortunately, big box pet stores wont budge.


----------



## LazarusOwenhart (Nov 26, 2018)

Purple People Eater said:


> -Most of my childhood and teenage years were spent competitively riding horses, and I've seen far too many little girls and families way in over their heads who've leased ponies and have no idea how to take care of them. Ponies with overgrown coats caked with shit in the summer being put into the ring, little kids yanking them around the showgrounds, or parents making their kids show horses that are clearly to big or hot-tempered for them to handle, endangering the safety of everyone else showing alongside them. Plus crazy trainers chewing out their riders for placing less than first and beating horses to get them to stop spooking (spoiler: that doesn't work). This sport is largely female-dominated, and it's as much of a catty mess as a dance competition. God forbid you try to help someone with their horse, lest you be accused of sabotage.



Dumbass horse people are just the worst. I used to ride when I was younger and I have like, a million stories of spoilt little brat kids who think a pony is a fucking fashion accessory. I always used to hate kids who think that a riding crop is used to punish an animal for refusing a fence or that the action of 'kicking' a horse (For the uninitiated IE: Gently tapping your heels on it's flank as a single to go faster, more a squeeze than an impact really) means extending your legs side-wards and slamming them into the horses kidneys as hard as you can. Luckily in the UK most of that is confined to the Pony Club set which I flat refused to join because I didn't want to prance around with a load of stuck up suburbanites wearing hacking jackets and blue and purple ties.


----------



## Cat Menagerie (Nov 26, 2018)

Kylie Raina said:


> Pet stores are downright HORRIBLE at giving animal-related advice. If you ask them something that should be common sense about an animal, they still manage to get it wrong. As a result, people are buying shitty plastic prisons for their hamsters, putting bettas in bowls with no filter, and sticking rabbits in cages. I’m glad that Petsmart and Petco stopped selling rabbits bc if they didnt, i couldnt imagine what deplorable conditions ppl would be putting them in. I’ve also noticed that pet stores don’t sell any hamster cages that are actually adequate for hamsters. Its disturbing and it shows that pet stores’ real motives are profit and not the well being of animals. The best thing you can really do is educate the consumers bc unfortunately, big box pet stores wont budge.




The plastic habitats, CritterTrail and the like, really piss me off. They're not optimal for any rodent of any kind. Gerbils and hamsters are fossorial animals with an evolutionary need to burrow. They need to be in tanks. Mice can go in tanks, too, and rats need large sturdy cages. Other than hamsters, they're all also highly social animals and need to be sold in same sex pairs to truly be happy and thrive. 

I won't even get into stupid horse owners. They're everywhere here I tell you what. People seem to think they need horses without clue one as to what goes into their care.


----------



## snuffleupagus (Nov 27, 2018)

So there was a no kill shelter in a podunk town near mine that was raided by the ASPCA after over a decade of neglectful animal care.



Spoiler: Foster Fuck Up



They were kind of the big name in the region, as they were no kill, but most people would whisper about the conditions. I’d donated money and animal supplies to them over the years and even adopted a cat from them. I signed up to be a cat foster which involved picking up a cat and that was it. No promised vet voucher, no guidance, no listing of the cat in various platforms, they just handed her over to me (not spayed as I found out when she immediately went into heat) and never contacted me again or returned my calls.

I wound up getting her vetted and spayed and eventually screened potential owners who responded to an ad I paid to place in the paper (dating myself here). Turns out she ended up being some fancy breed of unique cat and I was rushed with potential owners but using interview tips I gleaned off the internet, I was able to weed out all but the best. She was a gorgeous cat and awesome but I already had four cats and adding a fifth made litter duty go from slightly daunting to a nightmare.



So I kind of had a hate on for that shelter that dumped an animal on me ever since then. I stopped donating to them and instead gave to our local kill shelter (and have adopted a dog and cat from the county shelter since).



Spoiler: Long - Our Abused Lab



About two weeks before the no kill shelter was raided, they hosted an adoption event at the local Petsmart. I hated those events because the animals were in such bad shape and I wanted to take them all. It was heartbreaking. We’d had a pretty rough weekend already and had suffered a loss in the family so that really made us super vulnerable. We had to walk past rusty metal cages and crumbly kennels full of sad dogs and cats to get to the dog food aisle but managed to evade the soulful eyes of suffering animals and make our selection.

We decided to skirt the perimeter of the store that was not hosting the event (cats and small animals/fish area) in the hopes of avoiding another sad gauntlet of needy animals. There, in an isolated corner, was a black lab cowering and balled up as small as it could make itself in a metal kennel. No volunteers were nearby and he’d soiled himself and the area with foul diarrhea.

Note, in that moment, as a family we were as fragile as they came. My youngest burst into tears, my husband went storming off to find someone, and I tried to engage and comfort the dog. He refused to look at me and just started shaking like a leaf.

We couldn’t leave him there. The husband finally stormed back over with a teenaged volunteer who was apologetic and got him to come out of the kennel. We asked if we could properly meet him in a quiet place so she took us to the storage space in the back of the store. He kind of listlessly greeted us but quickly warmed to my pets. Within seconds he was pressed to my leg, quaking in fear and clinging to me (yeah I got diarrhea all over my pants). I sent the husband to get our other dog and bring her up to meet him.

They didn’t hate each other so we signed the paperwork for him then and there. We received paperwork for another dog (yellow lab, 8 years old) and they “cut us a deal” because he’d been at the shelter for at least two years according to the lady who took our payment. She was genuinely happy we were adopting him because this was his last adoption event and they were giving up on him (he would live out his life at the shelter as a lost case).

We loaded our terrified and filthy dog into the car and took him straight to the tub. One tense water heater’s worth of water later, the water was running brown off of him instead of black and we’d finally managed to clean the impacted mud and feces from the webbing between his pads and toes. He stayed curled into a ball with this dead look in his eyes for days before he finally started to relax and warm up to us.

At his vet visit we learned he was 37 lbs and about two years old (not the 8 we’d been told) and emaciated to the point that he will forever be stunted. He was in such poor condition he had no muscles and we had to carry him up and down the stairs into the yard until he got some meat on his bones and built up some muscles. Also, while labs are prone to dandruff his skin was flaking off in sheets. It looked like it was snowing wherever he laid down.

It took six months to get him to a satisfactory weight according to our vet and a ton of various supplements for his health and his skin in addition to antibiotics to treat his infected feet. Turns out it’s not good for dogs to live in muddy feces and have it impacted in their paws.

He’s 50 lbs now but very small for a lab and still bony, but he has good muscle tone and loves to run in the yard.

He didn’t know what a dog bed was when we got him and he’s terrified of everything. His life is one that is full of great peril and it is so heartbreaking to see a scared and traumatized lab. Labs are supposed to be bumbling meatheads, not neurotically fearful beasts.

Oh and he’s scared of water, a lab that’s scared of water. That shelter fucking broke him.

Here’s his second or third day with us



And now after years of love





When the shelter was raided it made national headlines because the conditions were so appalling. It was heartbreaking to see the conditions our dog had been kept in his whole life and helped to piece together the story behind why our dog was so broken inside. The fuckers running the joint ended up losing the shelter and all of the animals were confiscated, but they didn’t get any punishment from the courts. It still makes me angry even though it happened years ago.


----------



## Ava_Merlot (Nov 27, 2018)

@snuffleupagus oh my goodness this makes me wanna cry and hug my puppy. Hes a flat back lab with some Newfoundland in him and hes had some rough time before my MIL got him. He grew up in a metal cage so hes a little nervous but hes so friendly and loving!


----------



## PorcupineTree (Nov 28, 2018)

I know a guy who punched his pitbull puppy for throwing up.


----------



## Rudol von Stroheim (Nov 28, 2018)

Matted dogs are the worst thing to deal with in my line of work cause there's only so much you can say 'it's okay, sometimes it's hard to brush the dog..'
I've seen matts so tight that when we've shaved it off, it's come off the dog as a blanket. We've found shit and even a slug once on a dogs matting. Many many male dogs so matted on their genitals that they're skin is totally screwed from urine burn. A girl I used to work with dealt with a dog so matted that while shaving it off, it's foot came off. The paw had dislocated ages before and the matting had pulled it so tight that it'd severed the foot while simultaneously courterising it. The owners didn't even care.
There are only so many times I can hear 'he's a bit matted... But don't shave him!' or 'it's winter, he' ll get cold!' or - my favourite -' don't you think it's cruel shaving a dog off. At least when it's matted, it's warm.'
I don't get why people don't think of their own hair being matted and then apply the same mind to their dog. Like, matted fur on a dog is the same as having chewing gum stuck in every strand of your hair. It's painful.


----------



## DopeaddictKitten (Oct 7, 2020)

Sad story about mice, kinda long so I put it in the spoiler 

*EDIT Omg and now I'm seeing I just necro'd a two year dead thread, I am an idiot, sorry everyone *



Spoiler



I have a pet fancy mouse second hand from an idiot and we've been looking to get her a sister because they get depressed when they're alone, right? But I'm looking for a younger female so the one I've been keeping (Poppy) can be the dominant one and stay comfy in her cage cause it's always just been her all of her life until now that I have her and plan on being here company. But on top of that my boyfriend doesn't want one with red eyes which makes our search a bit harder cause most stores just have the plain white fancy mice with red eyes. So we've been checking in every few days with the main stores around us and started checking out family owned and other stores as well cause I wanna get her a lil sister ASAP.
Well the other day we get in this store and start looking and they have a perfect little brown girl looking much younger than Poppy. I was like, nice this is perfect! Finally!
But as I look in the cage, I notice there's 4 females including the one I like and also, for some reason a male??? I point it out to the owner/worker and he laughs it off. First he says he has a hard time sexing them (how?) and then goes on to say I'd be lucky to bring her home cause if she's pregnant I'd have more mice?? But I'm not trying to breed or raise babies, I try to explain this to him and ask if he has any other cages, hoping I can find a cage of just females.
I don't think he understood what my issue was though, but seeing I wanted to buy a mouse for sure, he got weirdly desperate and was like, 'Wait, don't go! I uhhh, we got more mice. I usually don't bring people back here but I can tell you really want a mouse so, come here.." he brings us into a back room with a tanks of rodents leading me to this shitty maybe 20gal wide glass tank on the floor, straight up FULL of mice. Like, can barely see the bedding full. And _surprise surprise_, mixed sexes, AGAIN!
So I'm sure they just let them breed like crazy, inbreed just as much, breed too young, fight each other, kill each other, eat each other's young, basically anything that can go wrong, probably *was* *happening* in that tank.
It was absolutely sickening. I know some people think mice are just gross little rodents meant for feeding snakes, or whatever, but it just made me so upset.
I still tried to explain _again_ that I wouldn't buy a mouse that was potentially pregnant and the dude just like, couldn't get it through his skull for some reason? And because he couldn't even follow that line of thought, as much as I wanted to explain the issues of having such an extremely over crowded tank, I was already about to cry and felt it'd be pointless. We left and I cried in the car like a baby, lol.
Maybe I'm making a bigger deal out of it than most would, but it left a bad taste in my mouth and I still worry about those poor little mice, not to mention all the other animals there that may be living in poor conditions as well. Sigh.


----------



## UntimelyDhelmise (Oct 7, 2020)

When I was younger I got a cockatiel from Craigslist. The poor thing was in a cage that probably hadn't been cleaned in years, one of her toes was either malformed or broken, one nostril was weirdly enlarged (also likely deformed), the owners apparently fed her _saltine crackers_ and her feathers were horrendously soiled. Despite all odds though she survived and was an absolute sweetheart who never bit anyone. She also paired up with my male green-cheeked conure. If they could've had babies I'm certain they would have. Ate together, slept together, constantly groomed each other, a perfect mismatched couple if I ever saw one.

Sadly though she passed away a couple years ago. Took her to the vet and her body was full of fluids and iirc, a ruptured egg (an incident she had issues with in the past). Decided to put her down as treatment would only extend her life for a couple months and she was clearly suffering. The hardest part though was having to bring her back to her mate so he would know what happened. I had to sit there with her body in my hands with the conure perched on my finger and watch as he, with the greatest gentleness, preened her wing one last time. It went on for a few minutes until he suddenly stopped, stepped away from her and bowed his head low. I'm one who tries not to anthropomorphize animal behavior but if that wasn't him telling me "I understand, she's gone..." then I don't know what else it could've been. But at least I was able to give her remaining years those of peace and companionship after such a shitty start.


----------



## Android raptor (Oct 8, 2020)

I volunteer with reptile rescue and have seen and heard so much awful shit. Neglected, underweight snakes with stuck shed and respiratory infections, beardies with MBD and other issues, even intentional abuse. 

One of my snakes that I adopted from the rescue had her back broken by her first owner. Amazingly it healed though she has very noticeable kinks and I think has some arthritis. 

My other snake was rescued from a storage unit in November a couple years back. He was put in a 40 gallon with I think 5 other ball pythons after the owner went to prison by the owners girlfriend. The mom of the owner tipped the rescue off and they had to get bolt cutters to get into the storage unit and get the snakes out. Amazingly none had any RIs but they surely would've died if they weren't rescued. 

And of course there's all the persecution of wild snakes that happens. People refuse to listen when you tell them it's best to leave wild snakes alone and killing them just increases the risk of being bitten (and that animals like horses and dogs are statistically more dangerous than snakes anyway). It's like they get sick pleasure in killing small wild animals and know snakes are a socially acceptable target. I'm really worried about Eastern Diamondback rattlesnakes especially, I've heard lots of herpers talking about how they aren't doing well and really should get legal protection.

I feel like with reptiles especially you really see how evil people can be to animals.


----------



## Aib Ld (Oct 8, 2020)

Android raptor said:


> snake stuff


I always wanted a snake. I did a ton of research for corn snakes since they're a good starter pet and very docile. Unfortunately, they never sell them around here. It's always ball pythons. I could had picked up a ball python -which I too done research on- but I really couldn't handle the huge size they could grow up on.

Back to the subject, there was a pet store with all the animals on horrible conditions. Birds screeching, dogs and cats crying, and the building was also small and cramped. I wished to desperately buy all the animals because of the sight alone. All I did was buy a spooked chihuahua out of it, and let him explore the house as I set my stuff up. On the early months, all he did was stay close to me to the point that I would trip over him. If anyone that isn't part of the family gets close to me, he would bark and charge at them. It took a bit of training and multiple visits to settle him down and say that no, they are no threat to me or him. He was very a very quiet and sweet Chihuahua over the years.
The pet store itself? Got shut down with enough complaints and the owner went to prison.
Unfortunately, my chihuahua got hit from a car as he chased a cat as I took him outside to play with toys in the middle of summer years ago. The driver never stopped. He was still alive but bleeding all over the place as I brought him to the vet, but somehow, by some miracle with surgery he lived. Except his neck was all crooked. His head is only all tilted, and he couldn't look straight. It was like seeing a giraffe but with an accordion for a neck. Vet told me he wasn't suffering like that, so with a painful decision I had to give him away. I didn't know how to care for a dog like that and didn't want to accidentally make him suffer, so all I had to hope that he was given to an owner or a shelter that knows how. I miss him so much.


----------



## Dwight Frye (Oct 8, 2020)

Nothing too horrific, but a few years back, I had to make the decision to put my cat to sleep after I found out he was suffering from feline leukemia. Devestated me since I'd had him from the time I was in high school, loved that little guy so much, and so did my other cat (still with me) who considered him his best friend. Tore my heart out seeing the other cat roaming around the house calling out for his friend and not being answered back.


----------



## Android raptor (Oct 8, 2020)

Ad Lib Moaning said:


> I always wanted a snake. I did a ton of research for corn snakes since they're a good starter pet and very docile. Unfortunately, they never sell them around here. It's always ball pythons. I could had picked up a ball python -which I too done research on- but I really couldn't handle the huge size they could grow up on.


You might be confusing balls with Burmese pythons. Ball pythons don't get very big, with females typically maxing out at around 4 1/2 feet and males around 2 1/2 to 3 feet. That's part of why they're so popular, they're both docile and stay small. 

Unfortunately the popularity has lead to ball pythons becoming overbred and there are so many that need homes. The rescue I help has so many normal balls especially. People buy them on impulse then loose interest. It's sad.


----------



## Agent Abe Caprine (Oct 8, 2020)

Saw hermit crabs in an open enclosure right by the rats. So close to the rats, that they could hop on in and mess with some hermies. Held one and it was pretty lethargic.

Don't even get me started on the pellets stores often carry. Those have preservatives that are awful for hermit crabs.


----------



## UntimelyDhelmise (Oct 8, 2020)

Ad Lib Moaning said:


> I always wanted a snake. I did a ton of research for corn snakes since they're a good starter pet and very docile. Unfortunately, they never sell them around here. It's always ball pythons. I could had picked up a ball python -which I too done research on- but I really couldn't handle the huge size they could grow up on.


As @Android raptor said, balls don't get that big. In fact corn snakes can potentially get _longer _than balls (up to a maximum of 5-6 feet). That said though, if you really want one and just can't find a local place, there's always online. It sounds daunting but as long as you research the breeder and choose a good time of year where it's not too hot or cold, it'll make the trip just fine. That's what I did to get my ball about a month ago.

Which, in hindsight I feel a little bad about. I thought about looking at rescues but I wanted to start with a baby that was some kind of unusual morph (mine's a banana). I knew to avoid the bad eggs like spiders and such due to the "built-in" defects they're notorious for and my boy looks perfectly healthy, but it's one of those things where I think back and go, was I selfish?


----------



## Android raptor (Oct 8, 2020)

UntimelyDhelmise said:


> As @Android raptor said, balls don't get that big. In fact corn snakes can potentially get _longer _than balls (up to a maximum of 5-6 feet). That said though, if you really want one and just can't find a local place, there's always online. It sounds daunting but as long as you research the breeder and choose a good time of year where it's not too hot or cold, it'll make the trip just fine. That's what I did to get my ball about a month ago.
> 
> Which, in hindsight I feel a little bad about. I thought about looking at rescues but I wanted to start with a baby that was some kind of unusual morph (mine's a banana). I knew to avoid the bad eggs like spiders and such due to the "built-in" defects they're notorious for and my boy looks perfectly healthy, but it's one of those things where I think back and go, was I selfish?


I don't think it's super selfish to buy a morph from a breeder as long as you make sure the breeder is good. I guess it's like dogs or any other pets. Some of my friends have both morphs they bought from breeders and rescues they adopted.


----------



## MysticMisty (Oct 8, 2020)

Android raptor said:


> I'm really worried about Eastern Diamondback rattlesnakes especially, I've heard lots of herpers talking about how they aren't doing well and really should get legal protection.


That's not happening. Wolves have a hell of time getting/keeping protection, and some people actually _like_ wolves. No way there's going to be protection for venomous rattlesnakes very few people care about.


----------



## Android raptor (Oct 8, 2020)

MysticMisty said:


> That's not happening. Wolves have a hell of time getting/keeping protection, and some people actually _like_ wolves. No way there's going to be protection for venomous rattlesnakes very few people care about.


I know. That's a huge part of the problem. My state considers venomous snakes pests people can hurt however they want. I wish I could do something to change it but I don't have that power. 

On the flipside the law means people can keep native venomous snakes without a permit. Not that that's a good idea unless you have lots of experience with them, but I know experienced herpers who keep them (especially ones that couldn't be relocated). At least those snakes will be safe and protected from harm.


----------



## Clockwork_PurBle (Oct 8, 2020)

I had lots of hermits as a kid. In hindsight my enclosure wasn't as nice as you're supposed to have but my hermits were always healthy and active. Lots of chirping! I had one specific crab for 6 years - Moe (like the Stooge not anime girl). When I bought him I just thought "he is Moe" for some reason. He was a large crab, large when I got him. Blue shell with a penguin painted on. I found him 3 shells bigger than the one he had for if/when he needed to change. Came home from school one day to find he had died while changing shells. Don't know why, there was nothing wrong with the environment.


Autumnal Equinox said:


> Nothing too horrific, but a few years back, I had to make the decision to put my cat to sleep after I found out he was suffering from feline leukemia. Devestated me since I'd had him from the time I was in high school, loved that little guy so much, and so did my other cat (still with me) who considered him his best friend. Tore my heart out seeing the other cat roaming around the house calling out for his friend and not being answered back.


I lost a cat to toxic shock a few years ago. We took her to the animal hospital, went home, and woke the next day to a call she passed during the night. We had another cat, a much older male cat. He walked around the house for several days making confused "mow?" sounds and moping.


----------



## Coffee Druid (Oct 8, 2020)

I hate the culture in reptile owning circles (especially with snakes) that you must always have MOAR. I feel like animal hoarding is just accepted. People like that, instead of calling them pets, call them their "collection". I suppose as long as all their animals are properly taken care of I can't complain _too_ much but it's weird. Unless you're a breeder, educator or pet rescue or something like that why do you need a dozen snakes? With several acquaintances I know I completely lost track of how many they have and what their names are. It's a common joke about how people impulse buy a snake or reptile at an expo.

Another snake community problem: obese snakes. They have the same issue as fat cats/dogs. People think it's "cute" and rage when you point it out. "The owner knows what's best/every snake is different!" I have a pet snake. a blood python. Those are heavy-bodied (AKA thicc) ground snakes but still follow the "healthy body weight" markers most snakes have like their spine should be visible, etc. People often think they are normally supposed to be obese but they are not and that's animal abuse.


----------



## UntimelyDhelmise (Oct 9, 2020)

Coffee Druid said:


> I hate the culture in reptile owning circles (especially with snakes) that you must always have MOAR. I feel like animal hoarding is just accepted. People like that, instead of calling them pets, call them their "collection". I suppose as long as all their animals are properly taken care of I can't complain _too_ much but it's weird. Unless you're a breeder, educator or pet rescue or something like that why do you need a dozen snakes? With several acquaintances I know I completely lost track of how many they have and what their names are. It's a common joke about how people impulse buy a snake or reptile at an expo.
> 
> Another snake community problem: obese snakes. They have the same issue as fat cats/dogs. People think it's "cute" and rage when you point it out. "The owner knows what's best/every snake is different!" I have a pet snake. a blood python. Those are heavy-bodied (AKA thicc) ground snakes but still follow the "healthy body weight" markers most snakes have like their spine should be visible, etc. People often think they are normally supposed to be obese but they are not and that's animal abuse.


I believe it's because, unlike other pets like most mammals and birds, reptiles and especially snakes are far easier to keep in larger numbers since you can have entire rack systems full of them with minimal mess, space and little if any noise. One could have 30 snakes in their house and visitors would never know since they'd all potentially be sequestered to a quiet corner room. That and they don't technically require constant interaction to be happy (still recommended obviously if for no other reason than making having to move them around easier). Not saying I agree with such practice, but that's how I imagine it's justified in their minds.

That and as someone who's dived into the world of morphs for a bit until I acquired my banana boy, I can very easily see how addictive it can get. Just with ball pythons alone the amount of variety is staggering and it can be all too tempting to go ham and amass a huge collection of your favorite colors and patterns. And it undoubtedly becomes all the more alluring if you're at a live show (well, if those even exist anymore) and become spoiled for choice among the hundreds of thousands of reptiles you can simply pick up and bring home on the spot.

Certainly agree on the "collection" thing though. I'm sure (or at least hope) that most people who use the term give their animals the required care and attention as much as any good pet owner, but it just doesn't sit well with me. It just sounds too, impersonal. Reptiles have it hard enough with how little sympathy and respect they get from the average Joe, the least avid herp enthusiasts could do is give their group of animals a more affectionate denotation beyond making them sound like a pile of action figures. I for one like to refer to my pets as "the crew." It's endearing but still sounds cool in a way.


----------



## Dysnomia (Oct 9, 2020)

Coffee Druid said:


> I hate the culture in reptile owning circles (especially with snakes) that you must always have MOAR. I feel like animal hoarding is just accepted. People like that, instead of calling them pets, call them their "collection". I suppose as long as all their animals are properly taken care of I can't complain _too_ much but it's weird. Unless you're a breeder, educator or pet rescue or something like that why do you need a dozen snakes? With several acquaintances I know I completely lost track of how many they have and what their names are. It's a common joke about how people impulse buy a snake or reptile at an expo.
> 
> Another snake community problem: obese snakes. They have the same issue as fat cats/dogs. People think it's "cute" and rage when you point it out. "The owner knows what's best/every snake is different!" I have a pet snake. a blood python. Those are heavy-bodied (AKA thicc) ground snakes but still follow the "healthy body weight" markers most snakes have like their spine should be visible, etc. People often think they are normally supposed to be obese but they are not and that's animal abuse.



Blame pet tube. There are so many reptile hoarder channels out there that make kids think it's ok and fun to overload yourself with animals.  Those people have to keep getting new animals to keep viewers interested.

My dog disappeared in June. I am fairly certain he was stolen.I thought he was in the house but he must have snuck out back. it was only a few minutes. He was a jack russell chihuahua mix and 15 years old. Very fast but he would not run away on his own. He's too timid. I had a hunch it was the guy who fixed the fence. Possibly someone visiting next door. No one really believed me though. I should have reported it to the police. 

If my dog is still around the only way I will get him back is if he gets loose or is dumped somewhere and he is taken to animal control. a lot of dogs were found in that time period who looked like mine. None of them were him.

I think given his age it is unlikely I will ever see him again. I blame myself for not watching him like a hawk. I had to move back to a bad neighborhood last year and had I been able to stay where I was this would not have happened.


----------



## Android raptor (Oct 9, 2020)

I was looking at the orangutans people can sponsor at a rescue/rehab the other day and some of the stories make me immensely MOTI.

"When Dr. Karmele, Director of IAR's operations in Indonesia, first came across JoJo, his condition brought her to tears. He was sitting in an open sewer surrounded by feces and garbage. His 'owners' had chained him up on a wooden pallet and his body was hunched over and weak from a lifetime spent in a tiny cage with a diet in no way suitable for an orangutan. He was severely emaciated and the tight chain around his ankle had caused a deep, open wound. He must have been in agony."

"She was chained to a tree for 13 years-- so long that the chain was embedded into her neck and had to be surgically removed."

"*Neng was on a short chain, huddled in a small ball at the end of a wooden platform consisting of two small wooden planks 30 feet above the water*. Her face was sunburned and we could see she was scared and severely malnourished. We learned later that her diet for the past six years had consisted of nothing but white rice and an occasional banana"

Why the fuck would anyone think it's ok to do that kind of shit to any animal, let alone something closely related to humans and critically endangered? People that do shit like that to orangutans and other great apes should face similar punishment to if they'd done those things to a human tbh.


----------



## Ido (Oct 14, 2020)

Coffee Druid said:


> I hate the culture in reptile owning circles (especially with snakes) that you must always have MOAR. I feel like animal hoarding is just accepted. People like that, instead of calling them pets, call them their "collection". I suppose as long as all their animals are properly taken care of I can't complain _too_ much but it's weird. Unless you're a breeder, educator or pet rescue or something like that why do you need a dozen snakes? With several acquaintances I know I completely lost track of how many they have and what their names are. It's a common joke about how people impulse buy a snake or reptile at an expo.
> 
> Another snake community problem: obese snakes. They have the same issue as fat cats/dogs. People think it's "cute" and rage when you point it out. "The owner knows what's best/every snake is different!" I have a pet snake. a blood python. Those are heavy-bodied (AKA thicc) ground snakes but still follow the "healthy body weight" markers most snakes have like their spine should be visible, etc. People often think they are normally supposed to be obese but they are not and that's animal abuse.





UntimelyDhelmise said:


> I believe it's because, unlike other pets like most mammals and birds, reptiles and especially snakes are far easier to keep in larger numbers since you can have entire rack systems full of them with minimal mess, space and little if any noise. One could have 30 snakes in their house and visitors would never know since they'd all potentially be sequestered to a quiet corner room. That and they don't technically require constant interaction to be happy (still recommended obviously if for no other reason than making having to move them around easier). Not saying I agree with such practice, but that's how I imagine it's justified in their minds.
> 
> That and as someone who's dived into the world of morphs for a bit until I acquired my banana boy, I can very easily see how addictive it can get. Just with ball pythons alone the amount of variety is staggering and it can be all too tempting to go ham and amass a huge collection of your favorite colors and patterns. And it undoubtedly becomes all the more alluring if you're at a live show (well, if those even exist anymore) and become spoiled for choice among the hundreds of thousands of reptiles you can simply pick up and bring home on the spot.
> 
> Certainly agree on the "collection" thing though. I'm sure (or at least hope) that most people who use the term give their animals the required care and attention as much as any good pet owner, but it just doesn't sit well with me. It just sounds too, impersonal. Reptiles have it hard enough with how little sympathy and respect they get from the average Joe, the least avid herp enthusiasts could do is give their group of animals a more affectionate denotation beyond making them sound like a pile of action figures. I for one like to refer to my pets as "the crew." It's endearing but still sounds cool in a way.


Honestly, my reptile limit is two and I have three of them. It's a constant struggle to get my ass up and do what I need to do, thank god the beardies don't shit in their tank or do anything other than sit and bask and the other one is a crestie who lives in a plastic container.

Edited because I accidentally clicked post but I just can't understand why people get so many, I love my lizards I really do but i feel like my attention is split so unevenly between my three because Beardo acts like a frail old man who goes out of his way to worry me, LittleBeard wants so much loving and cuddling but I'm worried about the old man, and the gecko is just... there, waiting to bite me. Even with three I feel like it's a gigantic time sink, one that if I want to take a little vacation from becomes a huge hassle to make sure they're taken care of while I'm away. I get snakes don't need to be messed with that often but I really can't comprehend owning so many animals that the idea of one on one time becomes a nightmare.


----------



## Coffee Druid (Oct 14, 2020)

Ido said:


> Honestly, my reptile limit is two and I have three of them. It's a constant struggle to get my ass up and do what I need to do, thank god the beardies don't shit in their tank or do anything other than sit and bask and the other one is a crestie who lives in a plastic container.
> 
> Edited because I accidentally clicked post but I just can't understand why people get so many, I love my lizards I really do but i feel like my attention is split so unevenly between my three because Beardo acts like a frail old man who goes out of his way to worry me, LittleBeard wants so much loving and cuddling but I'm worried about the old man, and the gecko is just... there, waiting to bite me. Even with three I feel like it's a gigantic time sink, one that if I want to take a little vacation from becomes a huge hassle to make sure they're taken care of while I'm away. I get snakes don't need to be messed with that often but I really can't comprehend owning so many animals that the idea of one on one time becomes a nightmare.


I only have one snake and that’s good with me. I have a dream lizard (black or white throat monitor) but besides that and a dog that’s all the pets I want. 

Sure, snakes can be easy to keep if your tank is properly set up. But it feels so impersonal to have too many snakes to handle on a personal level. Granted, some snakes or reps aren’t as handlable. But when they begin to feel like a display and not animals that’s a line for me. The upkeep is also a thing. I’m lucky to own a snake species that literally poops every 6 months (blood python) but reptiles like beardies do it a lot. And if you have tons of them....


----------



## UntimelyDhelmise (Oct 14, 2020)

Ido said:


> Honestly, my reptile limit is two and I have three of them. It's a constant struggle to get my ass up and do what I need to do, thank god the beardies don't shit in their tank or do anything other than sit and bask and the other one is a crestie who lives in a plastic container.
> 
> Edited because I accidentally clicked post but I just can't understand why people get so many, I love my lizards I really do but i feel like my attention is split so unevenly between my three because Beardo acts like a frail old man who goes out of his way to worry me, LittleBeard wants so much loving and cuddling but I'm worried about the old man, and the gecko is just... there, waiting to bite me. Even with three I feel like it's a gigantic time sink, one that if I want to take a little vacation from becomes a huge hassle to make sure they're taken care of while I'm away. I get snakes don't need to be messed with that often but I really can't comprehend owning so many animals that the idea of one on one time becomes a nightmare.


I think the most I would ever get would be 1-2 more snakes down the road (I'd like to have another species specifically to be a "refusal taker" since ball pythons are notorious for going off feed every so often and it'd be nice to not have a rodent go to waste every time that happens). Beyond my ball I also have a 55 gal aquarium of 11 fish, a conure and 6 chickens so I'm pretty well set for now. Though the chickens are in their twilight years (several have already passed on) and I won't be getting more after they're gone as whenever I'm able to strike out on my own, they wouldn't be able to come with me.


----------



## Clockwork_PurBle (Oct 14, 2020)

Dysnomia said:


> Blame pet tube. There are so many reptile hoarder channels out there that make kids think it's ok and fun to overload yourself with animals.  Those people have to keep getting new animals to keep viewers interested.
> 
> My dog disappeared in June. I am fairly certain he was stolen.I thought he was in the house but he must have snuck out back. it was only a few minutes. He was a jack russell chihuahua mix and 15 years old. Very fast but he would not run away on his own. He's too timid. I had a hunch it was the guy who fixed the fence. Possibly someone visiting next door. No one really believed me though. I should have reported it to the police.
> 
> ...


Don't beat yourself up too bad buddy. There is only so much you can do at any given time. 

My mom had a tiny chihuahua a few years ago. When she was bringing in groceries the dog ran out without her knowing and immediately shot off towards the road like a rocket (as dogs tend to do) and was flatted by a truck. My aunt has a 6-7 foot tall fence in her backyard, and her dog who isn't small but not as big as a lab is able to jump it. He does so constantly. Sometimes we'll let him out to pee and he immediately scales the fence. We can't catch him, especially if there's a truck that he chases. If he immediately jumps the fence one day and runs into a car, we couldn't have done anything. 

If your dog slipped out without you noticing, which happens since they're fast and can be sneaky, you can't help it.


----------



## Agent Abe Caprine (Oct 15, 2020)

Coffee Druid said:


> I hate the culture in reptile owning circles (especially with snakes) that you must always have MOAR. I feel like animal hoarding is just accepted. People like that, instead of calling them pets, call them their "collection". I suppose as long as all their animals are properly taken care of I can't complain _too_ much but it's weird. Unless you're a breeder, educator or pet rescue or something like that why do you need a dozen snakes? With several acquaintances I know I completely lost track of how many they have and what their names are. It's a common joke about how people impulse buy a snake or reptile at an expo.
> 
> Another snake community problem: obese snakes. They have the same issue as fat cats/dogs. People think it's "cute" and rage when you point it out. "The owner knows what's best/every snake is different!" I have a pet snake. a blood python. Those are heavy-bodied (AKA thicc) ground snakes but still follow the "healthy body weight" markers most snakes have like their spine should be visible, etc. People often think they are normally supposed to be obese but they are not and that's animal abuse.


Problem with crabbers, too.  There's two major groups in these communities. Kids and adults who take in people's unwanted crabs. The kids just see someone with a beautiful crabby family, which they want. This leads to more unwanted crabs. The claims of them having a short life are untrue. A well cared for crab can live well into its 30's. Heard about a guy who had a 40 year old one. Like parrots, these are multi-decade long commitments.

There's also people who will buy crabs to save them from the pet store's conditions. Good intention, bad idea. You're telling the store it's okay to house them in conditions even the spiders don't have to endure. Even snakes get a place to hide. Poor hermit crabs just have their shell.


----------



## UntimelyDhelmise (Oct 26, 2020)

A rather disturbing thing I've noticed is how willingly people just trade or give up entire swaths of their pet reptiles as if they're bargaining chips. I'm not talking selling babies (would be silly for a breeder to keep them all obviously), I'm talking people who amass collections and then constantly downsize or swap whatever they have for other creatures like it's some kind of Pokemon trading group. And then there are the ones who get a big collection, completely sell everything off for one reason or another, and then get a new pile of reptiles at a later date.

And the worst part is I know exactly why this happens too. It's far easier to just get rid of or swap out an animal you can't read like a dog or cat. As far as anyone's concerned they'd might as well be living decorations. But, they're not. Just from my own relatively fresh experience I've been able to pick up on what my snake does and doesn't like and get a feel for his perspective of the world; it's been so eye-opening yet it pains me to see so many others not give their own reptiles that same level of understanding.


----------



## Clockwork_PurBle (Dec 12, 2020)

Here's a "not horrific but still cursed" pet store story.

Now that I'm out of school I'm exploring the small city where I now reside more. We have 3 pet stores here: PetSmart, Petco, and Pet Depot. I have no complaints about any of them: they're all very clean, the animals always look happy and healthy, and the workers are nice and knowledgeable. I briefly thought about applying to Petco. In regards to Petco specifically, even their bettas are kept in large cups and always have crystalline water. I enjoy visiting them from time to time, because "free zoo" and I love fish tanks. That's what I did today.

I experienced a bruh moment at PetSmart. At this PetSmart (I don't know if this is common for all of them) they have a room where they let the cats out to roam around and play. This room has a large window for people to look inside and watch them. When I went, the four cats up for adoption there were in their "hutches" napping, so the room was empty.

What was in the room, however, was a stuffed toy sitting on a cat tower nearest the window. What was the stuffed toy?

The neighbor from _Hello Neighbor_. I took a picture of it and now my phone is cursed.


----------



## Niggernerd (Dec 12, 2020)

Back when i worked at petsmarts years back, we had some hills have eyes hilly billies come in wanting to adopt a guinea pig to replace the one they lost (i.e. retards left the poor bastard outside and a raccoon smashed it through the bars and took it) i really didn't want to but my manager is a jew about this shit so before giving it to them i gave the little guy a hail mary.

Another time, parents and their brat came in to replace the brats hamster because he drowned the last one. Again i didn't want to sell it to them, thankfully the manager wasn't there for the day so a hamster was safe.

Once, our manager ordered too many guinea pigs so they put like 20 of them in a pretty small cage. I leave for 4 days vacation, i come back and when i enter the new arrivals room, it smells like absolute hell because turns out one guniea pig got flattened to death by the rest.


----------



## Clockwork_PurBle (Dec 13, 2020)

Niggernerd said:


> Back when i worked at petsmarts years back, we had some hills have eyes hilly billies come in wanting to adopt a guinea pig to replace the one they lost (i.e. retards left the poor bastard outside and a raccoon smashed it through the bars and took it) i really didn't want to but my manager is a jew about this shit so before giving it to them i gave the little guy a hail mary.
> 
> Another time, parents and their brat came in to replace the brats hamster because he drowned the last one. Again i didn't want to sell it to them, thankfully the manager wasn't there for the day so a hamster was safe.
> 
> Once, our manager ordered too many guinea pigs so they put like 20 of them in a pretty small cage. I leave for 4 days vacation, i come back and when i enter the new arrivals room, it smells like absolute hell because turns out one guniea pig got flattened to death by the rest.


So workers/managers/whatever have the ability to refuse the sale or adoption of a pet? I didn't know this.


----------



## Coffee Druid (Apr 5, 2021)

UntimelyDhelmise said:


> A rather disturbing thing I've noticed is how willingly people just trade or give up entire swaths of their pet reptiles as if they're bargaining chips. I'm not talking selling babies (would be silly for a breeder to keep them all obviously), I'm talking people who amass collections and then constantly downsize or swap whatever they have for other creatures like it's some kind of Pokemon trading group. And then there are the ones who get a big collection, completely sell everything off for one reason or another, and then get a new pile of reptiles at a later date.
> 
> And the worst part is I know exactly why this happens too. It's far easier to just get rid of or swap out an animal you can't read like a dog or cat. As far as anyone's concerned they'd might as well be living decorations. But, they're not. Just from my own relatively fresh experience I've been able to pick up on what my snake does and doesn't like and get a feel for his perspective of the world; it's been so eye-opening yet it pains me to see so many others not give their own reptiles that same level of understanding.


Apologies for necro-ing the thread but that seriously irks me too. I have a couple snakes (blood python and garters). That's more than enough for me. I have acquaintances that also own reptiles and am part of  online snake groups. It's literally a meme that "you must always have MOAR". It's apparently common to just go to a reptile expo and impulse buy, or snap up reptiles from petco because "I'm rescuing them!" I don't doubt that chain pet stores are not the best for animals but that just encourages the shop to keep buying more to sell. Plus the fact that they call their animals their "collection", as opposed to pets is telling. At the end of the day, if they take great care of the animals they own I can't complain too much. But I don't get it.

On another topic, spring time means chicks for sale. I got my chicks from a local feed store that can tell you all about the hatchery they source from, what vaccinations they have, and provide ample heat and food while they wait to get sold. Meanwhile the chain store tractor supply just feels...sad. I went in to pick up some items and looked at the chicks there. So many had advanced pasty bum (when poop dries up around their butts and builds up. Can be deadly) it was ridiculous. Plus they had no bedding, just plastic trays to walk on. I get that chicks aren't meant to be at stores long term, but at least put in some care. Also it's not the responsibility of stores, but I worry about the whole "buying chicks (and bunnies) around Easter time, they're cute and small and perfect for kids!" And not thinking about them, you know, growing up. I've never known anyone to have done so but I'm sure there are idiot parents out there.


----------



## fishercat (Jun 3, 2021)

A family friend of mine recently adopted a puppy from an animal shelter. Said shelter apparently never tests their dogs for Parvo. Guess what that puppy ended up catching. Guess what required her to be quarantined for ages because the other dog they own has immune system issues that prevent her from getting vaccinations.

Go on. Guess.

The puppy is fine now, but the fact that the animal shelter apparently doesn't screen dogs they adopt out for diseases is disgusting to me. _Especially _Parvo, that shit's contagious as hell.


----------



## UntimelyDhelmise (Jun 27, 2021)

Coffee Druid said:


> Apologies for necro-ing the thread but that seriously irks me too. I have a couple snakes (blood python and garters). That's more than enough for me. I have acquaintances that also own reptiles and am part of  online snake groups. It's literally a meme that "you must always have MOAR". It's apparently common to just go to a reptile expo and impulse buy, or snap up reptiles from petco because "I'm rescuing them!" I don't doubt that chain pet stores are not the best for animals but that just encourages the shop to keep buying more to sell. Plus the fact that they call their animals their "collection", as opposed to pets is telling. At the end of the day, if they take great care of the animals they own I can't complain too much. But I don't get it.
> 
> On another topic, spring time means chicks for sale. I got my chicks from a local feed store that can tell you all about the hatchery they source from, what vaccinations they have, and provide ample heat and food while they wait to get sold. Meanwhile the chain store tractor supply just feels...sad. I went in to pick up some items and looked at the chicks there. So many had advanced pasty bum (when poop dries up around their butts and builds up. Can be deadly) it was ridiculous. Plus they had no bedding, just plastic trays to walk on. I get that chicks aren't meant to be at stores long term, but at least put in some care. Also it's not the responsibility of stores, but I worry about the whole "buying chicks (and bunnies) around Easter time, they're cute and small and perfect for kids!" And not thinking about them, you know, growing up. I've never known anyone to have done so but I'm sure there are idiot parents out there.


Even some of the YT channels I occasionally watch that constantly badger you for keeping this or that wrong and act all high and mighty, still refer to their animals as their "collection" and just about every single video state how they want to add this or that to their "collection" in time when they already have well over a dozen animals.

Such people must be super rich and spoiled af as well, because just with my one snake it's been expensive as hell just taking care of housing alone (and it's still not done either since I have to wait for the permanent enclosure I ordered to arrive, which could take half a year or more based on other people's experiences).


----------



## Blobby's Murder Knife (Jun 27, 2021)

People who keep large, working breed dogs in a cramped space while gone working 10-12 hours a day...just why? Get some 10lb yap dog that wants to be a lazy fuck.


----------



## UntimelyDhelmise (Jun 27, 2021)

Agent Abe Caprine said:


> Problem with crabbers, too.  There's two major groups in these communities. Kids and adults who take in people's unwanted crabs. The kids just see someone with a beautiful crabby family, which they want. This leads to more unwanted crabs. The claims of them having a short life are untrue. A well cared for crab can live well into its 30's. Heard about a guy who had a 40 year old one. Like parrots, these are multi-decade long commitments.
> 
> There's also people who will buy crabs to save them from the pet store's conditions. Good intention, bad idea. You're telling the store it's okay to house them in conditions even the spiders don't have to endure. Even snakes get a place to hide. Poor hermit crabs just have their shell.


Came back to this post because I just recently got back from a beach vacation. The place was very much a tourist trap and in nearly every souvenir shop there's hermit crabs effectively being sold as living trinkets (most places even say a crab is "free" with purchase of whatever minuscule plastic box they call a cage). Knowing what I do about hermit crab care, it was heartbreaking to know that 99.9% of the poor things would inevitably be consigned to a slow, agonizing death. They actually have gills and require high humidity (70% minimum) to breath properly, let alone all their other needs like warmth and deep burrowing material. In short, they all suffocate to death.

I'd argue they have it even worse than the likes of goldfish, since even the most simple of simpletons know a goldfish _at the very least_ needs to be in water. Most have no idea about terrestrial gills and the humidity needed for them to function.


----------



## Coffee Druid (Jun 27, 2021)

UntimelyDhelmise said:


> Even some of the YT channels I occasionally watch that constantly badger you for keeping this or that wrong and act all high and mighty, still refer to their animals as their "collection" and just about every single video state how they want to add this or that to their "collection" in time when they already have well over a dozen animals.
> 
> Such people must be super rich and spoiled af as well, because just with my one snake it's been expensive as hell just taking care of housing alone (and it's still not done either since I have to wait for the permanent enclosure I ordered to arrive, which could take half a year or more based on other people's experiences).


I just saw a post in a snake group I'm in: "I went to a reptile expo this weekend. My husband said no more snakes but tee hee, I spontaneously bought one!" That wasn't the exact words obviously, but it was the gist of it. And that's a common sentiment. Why on earth would you buy another living creature if you had no plans to (and presumably no enclosure ready) and the partner you live with did not agree to it? 



COCl₂ said:


> People who keep large, working breed dogs in a cramped space while gone working 10-12 hours a day...just why? Get some 10lb yap dog that wants to be a lazy fuck.


Reminds me of boyfriend's mom. She's retired, and does nothing but sit in her room 24/7 watching tv. She randomly decided to adopt a young husky (obviously a high maintenance dog) from the local shelter. She hadn't really made any accommodations for it. Maybe the excuse could be made she was lonely and wanted companionship, but she just left it roaming the house while she was in her room all day with the door closed. This is also the person who left out fatty cuts of steak and pieces of fast food burgers as "treats" for our friend's dog before. Needless to say we had a discussion and ended up taking the dog back. She was cute, but would probably have a better life with more active and aware owners.


----------



## Micotil 300 (Jun 23, 2022)

I've worked in the dairy industry on various farms for almost the entirety of my time on the workforce, and I've seen some shit. Like, the type of things that end up on vegan propaganda videos.

When I started my newest job as a herd manager a few years ago, the old herdsman was training me, and he was pretty checked out at that point. There was a very sick little bull calf in the barn, and I asked what he was being treated with, and if he had been IV'd recently (scours causing severe dehydration). The response I got was, "Do not bother with it. It's just a bull calf and he will die anyway." I just sighed and got a sodium bicarb IV ready, and he says, "Fine, show off then, I bet you $20 he will be dead by morning" (what a pleasant man). I was begrudgingly $20 richer the next morning, Mr. Bull is now Mr. Steer and is still alive, and I was left to ponder why you would take a job where your entire life revolves around caring for animals if you can look at a gravely ill baby calf and think, "Whatever, let him die."

We also had a milker who got fired because he didn't milk an ENTIRE GROUP of cows. Mind you, these cows had just calved and were at the most sensitive/illness-prone point of their lactation. He only got busted for it because the poor girls were bellering and leaking milk and could hardly walk, and the milkman called my boss to tell him we were short on the bulk tank by almost 800 lbs(!!!). We also had a lot of calves die at that point because the dude couldn't be assed to feed the newborns colostrum (calves are born completely lacking an immune system and get all of the necessary antibodies from their mothers through passive transfer through colostrum and there's only an 8-12 hour window where the calves can readily absorb this). It's basically a death-sentence for a calf who doesn't get colostrum or colostrum replacer.

We also (briefly) had a calf feeder who didn't know how to tube a calf with esophageal feeder, but would do it anyway (and very rarely because the baby was sick; she did it mostly because she didn't have the patience to train them to drink). We lost a lot of calves with her too, both from her improper tubing and her lack of attention to sanitation.

At another farm I worked at, we had a kid working for us who was a fucking psycho and had no business working with animals. One of the cows, a big, friendly girl, laid on the milking machine because the kid was too slow and she was done. Instead of calmly getting her to stand like a normal person, her beat the hell out of her with a pitchfork. She was afraid of all men after that. He also beat another cow and broke her tail, and when I finally said something to the farmer, he told me I was "too sensitive and it probably wasn't that bad." When I told him WHICH cow it was, he knew she would never do anything to warrant being treated like that and the guy never returned. Later, he tried to get a job at my current farm, and I very firmly turned him down.


----------



## Micotil 300 (Jun 23, 2022)

Oh yes, and _cats. _Farmers and cats still maintain the relationship that they've had for millennia, and most of the farmers I have worked for who keep cats will do anything for them; we've even called the vet in special to come take care of sick ones. I treat them with the care and kindness I treat the cows with, for the I consider the cats part of the herd too. 

People in rural areas have unfortunately figured out that if they have a cat they can't take care of anymore, or an oopsie litter of kittens, they can find a farmer to take them, and most will. The problem is, some cats just aren't fit to be barn cats, and anyone who subjects them to that is horrible. I actually have had two housecats that were dumped on farms I worked on. 

The first one was this ancient, crotchety old orange tom who I watched get steadily more emaciated and weak. The poor guy was dumped by his owner (who had him since he was a kitten) because he developed diabetes and he couldn't afford to get him insulin. So instead of surrendering him to a shelter or veterinarian, he decided to subject his kitty of fifteen years to a slow and horrible death. He had almost no teeth, and was completely declawed. I told my significant other at the time that, "I don't care what you say; we're taking Orange Kitty-Kitty (what I had started calling him) home and getting him to a vet." 

We got him on insulin, got him special food, and showered that crabby old man with love. I brought two kittens home for a few days, and Orange Kitty-Kitty would get cranky with them for drinking from his water dish and use his paw to splash them so they would leave. Ultimately, I wound up moving away but left kitty with my s/o, who called me sobbing one night a few months later because he had passed away. I just feel good that we gave that precious grumpy orange guy a good -- if heartbreakingly short -- time in a nice home with the food and medicine he needed and a warm bed to sleep in. 

One of my current cats (also an orange tom) came to me similarly. He was thrown in with a batch of (outdoor) cats that had been brought to us, but this guy was obviously a housecat. He's front-declawed, and almost completely deaf and possibly has some mental deficiencies. He would have almost certainly been run over by a tractor or cow, or taken by a wild animal, so I brought him home. I very much do not regret that decision... He is the funniest, sweetest, _clumsiest_ boy and I love him so much. 

I just don't know how someone can live with an animal, especially a social one like a cat, bond with it, and then do it so dirty like that. People suck.


----------



## Chump (Jun 23, 2022)

Can I give a PSA even though fish don't feel pain like we do. Can you please cycle your aquariums before you add fish to the tank. Please follow this diagram when first setting up an aquarium to properly describe show the progress of your aquariums cycle to establish the proper bacteria. Nitrate is way less toxic then nitrite.


----------



## Falcos_Commisar (Jun 23, 2022)

Bugaboo said:


> I think declawing cats just cause people don't want to get scratched or have their furniture clawed up should be an illegal. I know 2 people who have declawed cats and I just don't understand. If you can't take the claws, why get the cat? Like I used to get pinched by hermit crabs (well, just 1 of them was the big offended) all the time and I just deal with it because that's what they do and it comes with the package.
> 
> Speaking of cutting of things that shouldn't be cut off, I want to punch people right in the nuts who de-fang their tarantulas. Because of the nature of the spider's digestive system it can only eat liquid so when it catches it's prey it injects venom from it's fangs to liquify the insides and then it drinks them, with the fangs gone the animal physically cannot eat. If you can't accept that if you own tarantulas, sooner or later you will be bitten, perhaps a tarantula is not the right animal for you. Some pet stores do this to the tarantulas they sell and it just boggles the mind.
> 
> ...


Holy shit..... Defanging a spider is literally like breaking the jaw of an jawed animal and pulling out all the teeth at the same time.

No shit a tarantula may eventually bite you if handled enough, maybe it's just not in the mood, maybe it's gets scared, etc.

Speaking of tarantula neglect, years ago my enviro sci teacher told us about someone he knew who didn't think a tarantula needed water so he NEVER gave it a water bowl. The teacher gets it later and said when he put the water bowl in it's enclosure it RAN into it, hunkered down and drained the bowl in less than a minute. He refilled the bowl and it drank some more than went back into it's home.


----------



## Falcos_Commisar (Jun 26, 2022)

Madolche said:


> Reptiles are so easy to be abused or neglected, especially because of how god damn easy it is to just go into petco and walk out with a ball python or a leopard gecko. Many teens do not realize that Balls can live almost 3 decades, yet they are merely treated as accessory pets to show off to their friends how 'sick and cool' it is to watch them struggle against live prey. The dangers of feeding live...it makes my stomach boil.
> 
> My BF's brother had a leopard gecko that was only fed once a month because the parents said they heard it was ok from the pet store guy. They had her on impactful sand and no heat lamp. Thing was emaciated and as big as my thumb for a 6 year old gecko. I'm talking almost no fat on her tail and was always bone cold. Dead crickets and shit littered her tank and it was rarely cleaned. No matter what I told them they refused to feed her more often, citing there was no time for them to go out and get food! Why even get the poor girl if you can't devote proper care? Surprised she even lived for that long.
> 
> ...


Ohh yes

A good friend of mine in elementary school had a bearded dragon named Crystal. I remember they had the correct tank, correct tank material, lamp, crickets, and some kind of vitamin cube plus they'd feed her lettuce or some kind of left green as a treat. 

She was quite well taken care of, I think because friend's Mom did all the research beforehand (shocking because this was decades ago when "pet lizard" would usually mean an anole or MAYBE a little gecko) 

We knew be careful with Crystal as she was smaller than us and she had a pretty sweet setup.

Nowadays you have second time or even first time lizard people going for monitors when tbh the average lizard person never really needs to get last a Leopard gecko, bearded dragon, water dragon or a blue tongue skink.

Hell, I'd honestly say a Tegu/Teju should the "pinnacle" or "endgoal" species for 95% of lizard people. Monitors are HARD and iguanas are almost as bad.


----------



## MysticMisty (Jun 27, 2022)

I hate when this thread gets bumped because I'm reminded S exists and I never reported the family's abuse of keeping that parrot locked up in the dark garage 24/7. Or completely recognizing the abysmal conditions he kept his other animals in. Although I don't know what, if anything, could've been done, even for the parrot. But I still feel bad whenever I'm reminded of it. I really hope things have changed and he no longer gets whatever animal he feels like at the moment to try and show off money, but that's probably .


----------



## DespotCTM (Jun 27, 2022)

Falcos_Commisar said:


> Ohh yes
> 
> A good friend of mine in elementary school had a bearded dragon named Crystal. I remember they had the correct tank, correct tank material, lamp, crickets, and some kind of vitamin cube plus they'd feed her lettuce or some kind of left green as a treat.
> 
> ...


There's this guy on youtube, Animal1 Guy, who explains everything a reptile needs and what products don't do shit or are harmful, even shows the best ways to care for them.

He also handles neglected reptiles and that stuff can get hard to watch at times


----------



## Sylvie Paula Paula (Jun 27, 2022)

Not a pet store but still thread relevant. My aunt is a vet and one day when I was in the clinic with her for career purposes, a cat came in who the owner wanted shaved after her procedures because the cat apparently "smelled". This cat had an absolutely gorgeous coat and she did have a smell, but that was just regular cat smell. I commented that she didn't really NEED to be shaved and didn't really smell, but the customer is always right I suppose. While shaving her, the vet tech trimmed her whiskers which flabbergasted me. This wasn't a newbie either, the tech had been working there for 30 years.


----------

