Don't Buy Your Pets, Adopt Them

This weekend I spent quite a bit of time in various pet stores. As we looked at the animals in all these pet store chains, my heart sank. I knew all of those little guys needed homes. I knew they deserved to be loved. I also knew in some cases they were being treated poorly by the pet stores. They had way too many animals in one cage. Many of the animals did not have toys to play with. Granted, this was not the case with every animal in every store, but still it just made me sad. These animals were under socialized and in many cases going to be in bad shape by the time some decided to pay an over inflated price to take them home.

Now I'm not just making this up. Go a Petsmart store, any Petsmart store, and you will discover they are not currently selling birds. Why is this? Well you see Petsmart was selling sick birds to people. Yeah and it gets better...the bacterial infection the cockatiels had, can be spread to humans. Yes, Petsmart is trying to make things right by halting the sale of all birds and putting them all on antibiotics. However, it still makes me wonder how the birds got sick in the first place? Usually, birds who get this disease have been kept in unsanitary conditions. Now this may not totally be Petsmart's fault. I could be that the store isn't taking care of their cages, but it also could be an issue with the facilities that the birds or other animals are being bred. These kinds of things happen all the time.

I'm not anti all pet stores. I actually know of one Bird Store that does all the breeding and socialization on site. I take my boys there for grooming. I love the level of care the animals get. Yes, I still think the process they charge are too high, but I would rather pay that sum for a bird I know was well cared for than one that I'm not sure of where it came from.