Poor conditions at petco

Sigh. Poor animals.

These are just 2 pictures of one tank. The store is in a good area, and to their credit the tanks are mostly clean any time I come by, and there is one guy who seems to know and care enough, but I saw dead and severely ill fish on several tanks, and when I asked about ottos, they replied they were about to load this week's shipment "in 10 minutes"

looks like that got a sick batch of Cories in

Really aweful.

DoubleDutch said:

Really aweful.

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In uk we have pets at home, very similar tank conditions

Unfortunately stores seem to think that they can get away with bad husbandry cos their on high turnover of stock....a case of "well they won't be here for long so it doesn't matter"

Totally wrong attitude to have but unless consumers make enough noise, nothing will change. There have been stores that have stopped supplying livestock after peaceful picketing, boycotting and protesting at their stores but it is an all too rare occurrence sadly

AmyKieran said:

In uk we have pets at home, very similar tank conditions

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Putting any fish in this condition in a displaytank for sale is a crime.

Noticed the Cory in the first pic has a terrible bacterial infection (half of its body is affected).

DoubleDutch said:

Putting any fish in this condition in a displaytank for sale is a crime.

Noticed the Cory in the first pic has a terrible bacterial infection (half of its body is affected).

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Yeah, literally half of its body was enveloped by fuzz. That's the same tank on the larger picture, there were 2 dead albino cories, a bronze one was flashing like crazy, and another bronze one had a big chunk of its tail gone, probably infected and further chewed off by its tankmates. Broke my heart to see them that way and the store getting up to "add more" right away.

Ιt's always so hard to see this... It brakes my heart. Did you check on their bettas? The previous time I went to a big chain pet store, 90% of the bettas in the cups where dead. Of course, even though I neded to buy some things from there, I didn't. And I'm never ever going there again. Quite the oposite of my L(OK not so local, it's half an hour drive from here)PS. They're tanking AMAZING care of the animals they have, fish included. To make you understand, they change their bettas water every morning AND night. And they keep them in a huge tank, where each of them has 0.5 gallons of clean, warm water. And they have 10 , 10 gallon tanks for the more ''energetic'' bettas (they usually have some super healthy plakats in those)!!!

To their credit I've never seen a dead betta and while they still keep them in the small containers, their water always looks clean. I'm going to start widening my search for lfs because this is the same store where I bought 5 neons 2 weeks ago, all of which promptly died in the span of little over 24 hrs.
I think it's an issue of being understaffed and ignorant/apathetic staff.

There is one guy who consistently has provided good comments and recommendations and knows how to handle the fish, the people who are there when he's not couldn't care or know less about fish.

The other local chain where I go has a smaller fish section but I've never seen it in such disarray as petco. And the closest lfs is a quirky hole in the wall which isn't the cleanest, but their fish look healthy and they mostly have good feedback/info (the one time they failed is when they told me it would be OK to keep a rainbow shark fish in my 29g community tank)

Petco, poor conditions in fish tanks?

Kind of like the sky is blue, grass is green, water is wet, fire is hot, etc etc etc.....

Problem I find with these places I find is the job itself I’m in the uk so I guess the closest we have is pets at home but iv never found it that bad I know small chain stores that are worse , but large chain franchises like that are probably paying minimum wage to school leaver to get some beer money for the week end , can’t expect the staff to care really

It's eye opening to visit stores right as they open. In many cases, the tanks are littered with corpses, and the first job of the day is to remove the "deads". Some very good looking local stores, especially chains, clean the tanks of eyesores, but don't deal with the problems.

GaryE said:

It's eye opening to visit stores right as they open. In many cases, the tanks are littered with corpses, and the first job of the day is to remove the "deads". Some very good looking local stores, especially chains, clean the tanks of eyesores, but don't deal with the problems.

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Imagine if pet stores did this this for cats, dogs, bunnies, gerbils, hamsters... Ect ect... So many people would be yelling at them and trying to shut them down. They would be shut down, most likely sued and fined and have charges for jail on some people in the higher ups. But its a fish... So.

Rocky998 said:

Imagine if pet stores did this this for cats, dogs, bunnies, gerbils, hamsters... Ect ect... So many people would be yelling at them and trying to shut them down. They would be shut down, most likely sued and fined and have charges for jail on some people in the higher ups. But its a fish... So.

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Look at this, I thought this sort of thing went out 30 years ago. But wait this is the only way these fish can live now.

itiwhetu said:

Look at this, I thought this sort of thing went out 30 years ago. But wait this is the only way these fish can live now.

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Watch this advert very very carefully....around 15 to 18 seconds especially....


I was quite shocked that any company would use Discus in this way (or any fish for that matter). The advert was made in 2021 and is still in use.