This blog entry is also a letter that I am emailing out to various groups - to find out the opinions and whether there is anything that can be done to help the animals that end up in these pet shops where you can often find people who don't know what they are talking about when it comes to individual animals.
Each pet shop that sells animals are different with the people who work in them and their knowledge of the animals but generally the cages they are kept in even though they are 'temporary' are just too small for the animals that live in them. Also keeping animals in cages this small is telling the public that they can do the same.
I have thought for years that the animals have been kept in small cages but until I first got my degu's I never realised quite how small the cages are kept in.
Using Pets at Home as an example - I have adopted two degu's from them and bought two degus before mostly because I couldn't bear the thought of them living in those small cages. I have on both occasions been able to sex them and know more about them then the people selling them to me. In fact when I bought Arthur and Merlin I sexed them both as the shop assistant didn't seem to know how to. After speaking to other people it seems that Pets at Home are too good at sexing animals wrong from the small ones like degus and rats up to rabbits. This of course ends up leaving the customers with pregnant animals and then Pets at Home get the babies back to sell. I got two girls from them and I can say they warned me at this particular branch that the girls were pregnant and that I could take any babies back and they would sell them on. I adopted the girls because they cage they were in would have given them bumble foot and there was no way I was taking the babies back to that shop. As it were both females were pregnant - one had six babies the other had three and I have kept them all.
I have been in a couple of pet shops that have sold kittens. I have issues with pet shops selling small animals but kittens are something else. Both pet shops around the Brighton-Lewes area I have been in had kittens (up to four) in small cages that they were keeping the guinea pigs in. They didn't have room to move about and I left the shops horrified. Of course all the kittens had sold very quickly and I didn't know what to do about it anyway.
I feel the animals bred and kept in pet shops are the animals that are being looked over most of the time. There doesn't seem to be any way of helping them. I have contacted my local MP who has passed my concerns onto the animal welfare minister but I don't hold much hope there. I know there is a lot about to stop puppy farming because of the breeding and there being so many dogs - shouldn't the same be happening for the smaller animals that are harder to neuter and so pregnancies are more likely to happen. It seems where pet shops can't house or sex animals properly they shouldn't be sold at all.
Would it be right to ban all pet stores from selling animals? Most likely. There are enough of these small animals in rescue centers already that don't get homed because people but their small animals from pet shops. If animals are to be sold in pet shops there should be tighter regulations regarding both the sexing and housing of the animals.
