Now i have had a chance to calm down a bit i realise it wasn't so much the store that was at fult but the staff they choose to leave in charge of the care and well being (although P@H obviously do the hiring and training), of the live stock. If P@H made it some sort of policy to have at least one lead staff member that was passionate about fish then the stores would be much better.
I know if i were looking after the aquatic section there would be no dead fish in the tanks and the younger members of staff wouldn't be selling people fish the customers tanks weren't ready for.
Working in a pet shop is a minimum wage payed job. Training costs money, which combined with the low pay is the reason why so many pet shop staff are so clueless. And if the person training the staff is pretty clueless about fish themselves, then you are not going to end up with great results. A lot works against the favor of pet shops that sell fish turning out well;
There are hundreds (if not thousands) of fish available in the hobby and many pet shops will stock 50+ varieties of fish. To know everything important about those fish is takes a lot of research (you've also got to have good resources- there are loads of internet websites out there offering incorrect information about fish- i've seen sites stating things like goldfish (regardless of variety) only needing 10gals per goldie or saying stuff like how you can have one livebearer (regardless of type) per gallon etc. Even when you come onto a good fish forum, anyone can still offer advice.
Then you have the fish themselves. A great deal of pet shop fish arrive sick to begin with (many a time have i seen bags of freshly arrived guppys/platys ridden with whitespot/ich, or goldfish which such concaved bellys they could be suffering from any manner of the numerous diseases/parasites or conditions that can cause something like weight loss in a fish etc.
And even to someone very familiar with fish diseases & parasites, perfect indendfication of fish problems can still be a problem since so many fish diseases & parasites share the same symptoms (i could list many symptoms that share 4-5+ diseases/parasites/problem sources in common). When i used to be very active on this forum (once upon a time i used to log onto here almost everyday for years on end) i used to spend a great deal of time helping people in the fish emergencies section. But even with being so familiar with fish diseases & parasites, there were plenty of times when i came across stumbling blocks and could only round down a fishes problems to a small number of possible causes rather than a definite specific one.
There is also the cost of treating fish- fish medications are very expensive (£15's for a bottle of anti internal bacterial medication that only treats up 200gals worth of water and needs repeated treatments to work anyone? Even on a medium size tank you can sometimes easily use an entire bottle of medication treating sick fish successfully), while the fish themselves in comparison often cost the pet shop pennies. Pet shops are often not particularly profitable businesses, and often it works out cheaper to replace fish than to save them (harsh i know, but its the main reason why a lot of pet shops don't bothering medicating a lot of fish).
The fish themselves are often not the main money makers either- its the tanks & equipment etc that go with them that often make the largest profits. So as long as there is a regular stream of people coming into the shop to buy tanks, heaters, filters, decorations, substrates, fish food, fish medications etc then there will always be a steady profit. (Tho i still don't get the sense of dooming fish to death by selling them to any old customer makes good business sense as the customer will surely not come back again if their fish all die?)
Then there is the way that a lot of people view fish. Unfortunately, despite been scientifically proven to feel pain, to have both long term & short term memomories, to have complex behaviour etc, most people still view fish as dumb creatures that so stupid that they barely realise their own existence. People simply don't view them as being on the same level as other animals. So on top of everything else, it can be a mission just getting people to care about fish at all. When a fish dies, it is often simply flushed down the toilet or thrown in the bin like its a peice of rubbish, a broken decoration (which to a lot of people, unfortunately is what a fish ultimately are- just a limitedly amusing toy for the kid or a colourful creature to make an aquarium look pretty etc).
The tank conditions in pet shops are also stressful. In the constant noise & glare of customers, often there is nowhere to hide. With no medications present in the water & often a single filtration system that runs all tanks, diseases & parasites can spread like wildfire. The fish are often starved & highly stressed before they even arrive, having suffered temperature fluctuations over a long scary journey etc. Then when they arrive in this overstocked diseased tank (and possibly not even acclimatised properly), their long term suvrival for even lasting a couple of weeks is not looking great. A lot of pet shop fish die within just days of entering their tanks- even if the staff are picking out dead fish everyday, suddden deaths can happen a lot.
Meh...There are a lot of reasons like this (and more) as to why so many pet chain shops like Pets At Home have tanks full of dead or dying fish and staff who are completely clueless or blasé about the fishes plights. It is very sad, very sad...But i doubt much will ever change. There is sometimes more hope in the smaller more privately run pet shops (particularly those who specialise towards fish).
I felt pretty depressed about the state of LFS before i moved to a new area & came across this great LFS called Aquajardin; their tanks are beautiful, their fish very healthy and on every tank they have put labels listing the basic care of the fish in question (for example "Grows to X size", "Predatory, will eat small fish", "Is solitary" or "Must be kept in a shoal" etc). The staff also seem to have some sense about keeping common popular fish, and ask customers about their tank set ups (for example i was talking about moving some fry to another tank and the girl asked me how long the tank had been set up for etc). So there is still hope
b .
Do you boycott or not boycott though when it comes to the bad stores? I can't really say for certain. It depends. In some cases yes, but its a complicated cup of tea and thats another debate altogether (plus i've waffled on way too long lol)
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