I live in a reasonably sized town in the UK, and on the high street is an old-school pet shop that sells rodents, reptiles and fish. We also have a Pets at Home (similar to Petco I guess), which is where I get most of my fish from, but the other day I decided to take a look in this pet store to see what selection they had. I've been in there before to look at the turtles, but this was before I was into fish-keeping so to be honest I didn't really take much notice of the fish section (it's kinda hidden round the back, and not at all that big). I do remember thinking at the time - this was a few years back - that it was quite dirty and the guy didn't really seem all that passionate about the animals. I returned to the shop a few days ago, thought he might have some different species of fish that I could buy. I was quite horrified to see the state of the tanks, it looked like the water hadn't been changed for MONTHS. There was lots of debris floating around, clouding the water of every tank, there was even a poor little axolotl in one small tank, which was also filthy. When I left I felt so sorry for the animals in there that my instant thought was "must buy tanks, get set up, and rescue as much as I can from there"... which is something I've been known to do (I go a little crazy when I see animals in poor conditions). The guy didn't seem like he even wanted to be there, and was pretty rude and curt towards us as potential customers. I later had another thought though; if I buy animals from this guy I am enabling him to buy even more animals to keep in these horrible conditions, I'm supporting his business... so I changed my mind about buying anything from this shop, but I still feel bad for the poor animals left in there... I don't see the point in reporting him to the local authorities because the animals were fed and everything, just they were in small and dirty tanks. He's been running this business for years and it's possible I've got it wrong, but I've never seen any other pet shops that gross... plus I don't know if the fish were WC, or if they have parasites etc... who knows. What would you do? Would you buy fish from here?
I avoid Pets at home. Most employees really don't know much about fish. Maidenhead Aquatics is much better, they have branches all over the country and all employees are knowledgeable about fish. There should be a branch near you My favourite shop in an independent in Bristol called the aquatics shop. I always check on FS shown I am in a new areas, I've seen some dire shops and I would rather not support a store that doesn't take care of its fish.
The Pets at Home near me is not bad, but it only opened recently so I guess everything is still pretty new. The staff in there do seem pretty passionate and talk to me about the fish for aaages (they know me by name now haha), but yeah they often don't even know as much as I do, and I'm novice at best... I like the fish, not the advice. Agreed maidenhead aquatics are really great! I've been to a few of their stores (and actually I found an alarming amount of dead fish in one of them) but I've not got anything from there yet - they're all just about 45 minutes + drive from here, so it's not as easy to get to.
I wouldn't support a bad business. I would make a call so that perhaps they could be checked out by authorities. Who knows .. it might do some good. Keeping animals in filthy conditions isn't acceptable either. A dog that has food/water, but kept in a filthy cage would still be reportable.
