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The following article, written by undercover journalist Becky Morris, appeared in The Daily Mail (13 January 2000). Many thanks to Ms Morris and The Daily Mail for highlighting the dreadful plight of the animals for sale at PetsMart. Until this chain stop selling animals completely and on a permanent basis, I would ask you to join us in boycotting their stores. Ricky Sykes wanted a new hamster, and well he might. His parents bought the 10-year-old a pet hamster fromPetsmart. But instead of bringing joy, the cuddly ball of fluff lay in a miserable heap in his cage plagued by diarrhoea. The family took its sickly pet back and it lived out its last hours in a cramped quarentine room at the back of the store. 'Wet tail', I was later to discover, had been rife here. Unbeknown to Ricky, it died the very afternoon he returned with his father to find a replacement. It was my first day undercover as a livestock handler at Petsmart in Harlow, Essex. Despite being completely untrained, with a CV containing no experience with animals, I had been given the job on the spot. Petsmart had just been the subject of a horrifying report on BBC's Watchdog programme which alleged animal cruelty, and I was trying to establish whether the vast chain of pet supermarkets had been as bad as it had been painted. I soon found out that things were worse than I could have imagined. I discovered the store was selling animals it knew had been exposed to disease. I was asked to throw away live crickets and witnessed a deplorable catalogue of ignorance and mismanagement as poorly paid teenagers struggled to run the store with little assistance from the senior staff. I was paid £3.80 an hour to care for and sell a huge range of animals. Written on the side of the boxes in which animals are taken home in was: 'PetsMart - where pets are family'. On the other side it says 'The caring pet professionals.' The store is piled high with pet products and expensive toys. As Paul, the store's manager, told me when I was interviewed, only 3pc of PetsMart's profits come from selling pets. 'They may spend only a fiver, but they'll spend £50 on the cage and keep coming back for feed, ' he said. 'That's why pets are so important at PetsMart. Without them we'd be just another store.' The RSPCA is doing its best to persuade PetsMart to abandon its sale of pets, so far to no avail. 'We're totally against the idea of pet supermarkets,' a spokeswoman said. 'They encourage impulse buying and the information given out by staff is often woefully inadequate. What's more, the animals have often been taken from their mothers too early by the breeders and transported across the country.' I was to be taught my job by Charmaine, a 17-year-old sixthformer who worked at PetsMart in the holidays and at weekends. Rabbits, tarantulas, chipmunks and cockatiels thronged the cages at the back of the shop. I had little idea how to care for them. Worryingly Charmaine wasn't much better informed - and, as this was effectively her Saturday job, why should she be? One of our tasks was to feed the reptiles. 'I hate this,' Charmaine confided as we surveyed the stack of tanks with their neon lights, each containing a lizard, frog or snake. 'I can never remember what they all eat.' She went to the freezer and extracted a plastic pouch of frozen baby mice. 'Do you think these are all right for the corn snake?' she asked. 'Aren't you going to defrost them?' I asked. 'No,' she replied. 'The microwave's bust. I put them in the cage frozen.' This afternoon we were joined by Jade, the livesock manager. She set Charmaine and me to work on stocking up the live feed. 'Chuck out all these,' said Jade, waving a hand at plastic boxes containing crickets, emitting piping chirps, 'they're old.' I was then instructed to 'write them off' on a special form. In the reason column Jade told me to write 'dead.' 'But they're still alive I pointed out. 'Yeah, I know,' she laughed. 'But they're food. Who cares?' 'Delivery for livestock,' shouted Simon, a shelf stocker. Charmaine and I went to the back door where there were three large, unmarked boxes. We opened one to reveal a layer of polystyrene chips. Charmaine dug in a hand and came up with a dead rat - frozen. We shrieked. Simon kindly unpacked the rats for us. Then, without washing his hands, went back to putting paper sacks of dog biscuits on the shelf. Hygiene at the store was deplorable. The staff room was filthy, with a dank sink where we not only prepared our food and drink but also rinsed, in a cursory fashion, all the animals' food, water bowls and bottles. The Watchdog programme contained the shocking testimony of a PetsMart employee who had been instructed to kill hamsters by smashing them in a bag against a wall to save vets' fees. I saw nothing on that scale but Jade admitted she had known the batch of hamsters which included Ricky's pet had been riddled with wet tail. After a couple of days I was only too glad to escape. But no such relief is offered to the animals at PetsMart. The American-owned chain was bought in December by its British rivals Pets at Home. A spokeswoman said: 'We are aware, following earlier media reports and our own investigations, that standards at some PetsMart stores are not as we would wish them to be. We are at this moment undertaking a radical review of all PetsMart working practices and will be bringing threm to the highest level in the shortest posssible time.' If you would like to send your comments to PetsMart the contact address is: Head Office, PetsMart House, Dorking Complex, Faraday Road, Swindon, England, U.K. Tel: (01793) 501-700. BIG PAWS UP TO WAYNE ON THE BIG BREAKFAST! |
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