When buying a new pet you want to be sure it’s happy and healthy when leaving the shop. Pets at Home say its animals are all bred in comfortable and caring surroundings and that their pets are then looked after by staff dedicated to their welfare. It’s all very reassuring but in reality do they live up to their promises?Read Pets at Home's response.
Christina Sage bought guinea pigs Batman and Robin from Pets at Home in the Cardiff Ty Glas store as a present for her 4 year old son Dylan. But within three days, Robin fell ill, losing all the hair on the side of his face. A vet later confirmed that both he and Batman were infected with the painful fungal infection, ringworm. As a result, Dylan is forbidden from playing with them whilst they undergo treatment and Christina can only handle them if she wears plastic gloves.
Ringworm is highly infectious and can spread easily between animals. But as 12 year old Chloe Cameron discovered, it can also be passed to humans too. She bought two guinea pigs from the Pets at Home store in Carlisle. They too fell ill, and shortly after their diagnosis with ringworm, Chloe noticed a circle up on her neck.
This circle spread, leaving her with painful sores all over her body. Unfortunately, Chloe already suffers from a condition that affects her immune system, so she collapsed and ended up in hospital, where she was treated for several days. To make matters worse, her dad then caught ringworm too. Thankfully Chloe, her dad and her pets made a full recovery, but the experience was a very distressing one for all concerned.
Unfortunately, some animals don’t recover. Caroline Parkes bought rabbits Frank and Wonky from the Pets at Home store in West Drayton. Both animals sadly died within 11 days and Caroline believes that they should not have been sold the way that they were.
After talking to unhappy customers, we decided to test out Pets at Home for ourselves. Vet Mike Jessop, former president of the Small Animal Veterinary Association, joined a team of Watchdog secret shoppers on visits to eight of Pets at Home’s stores across Britain.
In every store, our team came across fish that appeared to be suffering from disease. In four of the stores, we found fish with ‘white spot’, a parasitic and infectious disease of the skin that could have affected all of the other fish sharing the tank. In seven of the eight stores tanks contained dead fish – we counted over 50 in total. Some of the worst conditions were in New Malden and Stockport, stores that proudly advertise themselves as specialist ‘aquatic centres’.
In the West Drayton store, Mike Jessop was so concerned about the welfare of two of the rabbits for sale that we decided to buy them so they could be taken away for treatment. Later examination confirmed that one was underweight, while another had an obvious skin condition. We also bought a Guinea Pig in Cardiff Ty Glas store that later turned out to be suffering from scurvy.
Throughout our mystery shopping trips we found evidence of some Pets at Home staff members failing to follow their own welfare advice. A sign in the Carlisle store clearly states that you shouldn’t keep an Aquatic Dwarf Frog with small fish, yet we found one in a tank along with, you’ve guessed it, small fish. We also found a sign in the Durham store that says Syrian hamsters must live alone or else they’ll fight. So why did we spot three in one cage?
As well as the conditions of the animals, we’ve also had complaints about Pets At Home’s after-sales service. Before leaving the store with a new pet, staff are supposed to give customers all the care information they need, checking off everything they tell you on a tick list on your receipt. But, in half the stores we visited, the staff asked us to sign to say we’d received information that they simply hadn’t given us.
Sick and dead pets, hazardous conditions and staff failing to do their job. Not so reassuring afterall?
Wednesday, September 26, 2012
Pets at Home Investigated by Watchdog
The BBC consumer programme Watchdog has investigated the chain of pet stores Pets at Home and found it wanting.
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3 comments:
Nice stuff..Good article..
Fed up of people accusing pets of home of being an unethical pet store.
People breed and sell animals illegally all the time often too young to be sold and in an unhealthy state. Pets at home is a retailer that is trying to meet the need for people wanting animals, but they are trying to do it in a legal way and so the animals all go to good home and are healthy.
What's so frustrating is the fact that people will walk into the store and see a fish with white spot or a dead fish in the tank, and assume they are not looked after properly when in fact pets at home keep so many fish that they are bound to get diseases and the odd fish will die. But colleagues do their best to treat these fish and prevent as many as possible from being ill.
Similarly with the guinea pigs; ringworm is the most common fungal infection prone to guinea pigs. If a guinea pig is sold that gets ringworm or already has ringworm (which at the start can often be hard to spot), it can easily be treated and it's common sense for humans not to handle the animal with ring worm. And even if the person catches it isn't the end of the world- and certainly isn't the pet shops fault! It can happen to any animal!
Syrian hamsters MUST BE KEPT ALONE AS ADULTS!!!! The reason they are in the cage together in Pets at home stores is because they are young, so will not fight until they become adults.
At the end of the day, people will always find faults with Pets at home because people never mention the good, always the bad. But if Pets at home wasn't around, and any other pet shops, then this would encourage irresponsible breeders who will do a lot worse for animal welfare then Pets at home, who's aim is to put PETS BEFORE PROFIT. And yes this is true, for example people complain that pets at home won't sell them a fish because they haven't got a filter. This is because they put the welfare of the animals before the extra sale that they could have made.
It's about time people started focusing on all the good they do for the animals.
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