by Pajarita » Thu May 04, 2017 9:30 am
Look, you sound very young and the young are, by nature, idealists -nothing wrong with that! plenty of time later in life to find out about all the bad out there- but I have seen many, many petstores and what you see and think you know is never the whole story. Petstores ALWAYS tell you they don't buy from mills - they would be stupid to admit to that as people would not buy from them if they did! And they always say the right thing -again, nothing but good business sense. But I will give you one example: Navre's rescue was recently involved in a terrible, terrible hoarding case (hundreds of birds, some of them quite rare and valuable!). The poor birds had been starved, left with no water, in cages so rusted that they had to cut them open to get the birds out - I mean there were dead birds in the cages and the ones still alive were in such terrible shape that, even after the rescue, they lost a lot of them to refeeding syndrome. And I later found out that the person who did this was either the owner or the breeder who provided birds to a VERY reputable petstore in Manhattan - a store that had been recommended to me by two different people as being so good and so conscientious about their birds. If you own a petstore and really take care of the animals in it, you don't make any money and you have to close it down. It's simple math.