Rescues and Ransoms

I used the pet store, but I wasn't especially proud of it.

It was the only pet store in our small town, and it was the only place locally I could go to for reptile supplies for my pets, especially crickets.  Anything else - lamps, bulbs, bowls - I guess I could have ordered online, but I didn't trust that system for crickets - at least not in the small quantities that I needed.

Anyway, the pet store had a sketchy reputation in our town for its animal care, so I wasn't too surprised when a visitor called the zoo one day expressing concerns about it.  The other day, she had gone in to get cat food and saw a big boa constrictor in a shabby, small tank at the front of the store.  The woman didn't have too much experience with snakes, but to her it looked sunken in and depressed.  She had decided that she was going to rescue it from the store and turn it over to the zoo so it could have a good life.

And how, I asked, was she going to get it from the store?  Simple - she planned on buying it.

It's not unusual to see sad-sacks like that boa in the window of pet stores, be they small and local like the one I frequented in those day or big chain stores.  A lot of people, both casual passerby and experienced herp keepers, sometimes succumb to the temptation to take in these critters and give them a good home, nurse them to health, and in general rescue them.  They do so by buying them (the alternative, of course, being highly illegal, unless the store decides to just give the animal to you, which has never been my experience).

The problem is, the store doesn't care about your motivations.  You came in, you gave them money, and you walked out with an animal.  That's not a rescue.  That's a purchase.  It would be the exact same experience for them as if anyone else had bought one.  All they see is that they sold an animal, and it reinforces the idea that they should restock and bring in another one so they can sell that.  The logical, but harder, path to follow is to refuse to buy those animals that look like they are in bad condition.  The animal may die in the store - but then the store may take a lose, look at its ledger, and decide that it's not worth stocking that animal anymore, or at least change husbandry practices so that they stay alive and in better health longer so they can be sold.

I've been guilted into a pet store mercy buy before.  Years earlier, I bought two red-headed agama lizards (heavily discounted, which should have been a warning to me) from a local pet store to "rescue" them.  I'd seen them the last few times I went to the pet store and felt bad for them.  I knew what the species looked like in the wild.  This definitely wasn't what they were supposed to look like.  I was sure that, with the appropriate diet and set-up, they would thrive.  They didn't. One died almost immediately.  The other lasted a few months, but never really took off (and there was no reptile vet in the area to take them too).  The store filled their old tank with something else a day or two after my purchase.

The lady never bought the boa - it was sold to someone else.  Weeks later, I saw a Philippine sailfin dragon in the store window, a gorgeous, massive lizard that I had cared for in a zoo setting previously and greatly admired.  It's a species that has no business being in a pet store window.  I knew that I couldn't keep it properly - I'd have to renovate a bathroom in my apartment and give it up to the lizard to give it enough room.  I also knew no one else in town could probably have taken better care than me.  Each time I came to the store, I saw the price whittle down lower and lower.  One day, I came in and it was just, not there.

I never asked what happened to it.  I was glad when I moved, and was able to get my crickets from somewhere else.