OK, so I'll chime in here (I have no idea why I'm admitting this, but I'm nothing if not honest to a fault ?...I used to be a member of PETA, I was a donating, active member from the age of 23 to 31 (I'm now 37). Now when I say "active member" I mean that I volunteered for events that local chapters all around Pennsylvania were holding, never anything violent or consisting of illegal activities. So obviously I am very familiar with PETA, what they do right and what they do wrong, and I could tell many, many stories of things that they have done that were both illegal and immoral. The reasons that I quit are numerous but the largest reason was because the chapters local to me were starting to organize and take part in increasingly more and more violent, illegal, and immoral activities that were not about helping animals at all, but rather about punishing people that they thought were hurting animals. This wasn't my gig, so I left.
Now obviously I have always had numerous pets, I grew up in a house that bred parakeets, cockatiels, and certain species of conures, and we always had dogs, reptiles (I had a green iguana for over 11 years during this time), a cat, large freshwater aquariums, etc. Never a lack of animals in my home then or now. And lots of my fellow PETA members had many pets.
Here's the deal with PETA:
While it is an international organization that represents itself publicly as being a certain way and having certain ideals, beliefs, and practices, the reality is that PETA has different chapters all over the country and each chapter is completely different regarding rules, ideals, etc. So stereotyping all PETA members as being extremists who use violence, who don't believe in people owning pets, who vandalize and steal and cause injury to other human beings is just not true. I CAN HONESTLY SAY THAT THE ENTIRE TIME I WAS A PETA MEMBER I OWNED PETS AND SO DID ALL OF THE OTHER MEMBERS I KNEW PERSONALLY FROM MY LOCAL CHAPTERS, MY LOCAL CHAPTERS NEVER ONCE DID ANYTHING EVEN REMOTELY QUESTIONABLE, AND EVERY SINGLE EVENT I PARTICIPATED IN (THERE WERE A LOT) WAS FOR THE GOOD OF ANIMALS. If this had not have been true I would have left immediately. WE DID SOOOOOOO MUCH GOOD! We raised so much money, not only for large, well-known organizations but for local animal rescues and shelters, for people who were fostering animals. We never did anything negative against a pet store, but rather went in to many, many, many pet stores all over Pennsylvania, inspected their live animals, their habitats, their husbandry, and their diets, and we made both verbal and written suggestions for change. We educated employees of pet shops, veterinarian offices, rescues, shelters, etc. Everything we did was 100% for the good of animals, and there was never anything we did that every member of this forum would not approve of full-heartedly!
That being said, we couldn't help those who didn't want to be helped, and UNFORTUNATELY THE PLACES THAT DIDN'T WANT TO BE HELPED WERE THE PLACES THAT NOT ONLY NEEDED HELP THE MOST, BUT THEY WERE PURPOSELY AND KNOWINGLY COMMITTING SEVERE ANIMAL ABUSE, NEGLECT, TORTURE, AND EXPLOITATION. The usual suspects at that time in my locale were always Petco, PetSmart, SuperPetz, and PetLand. We categorized their abuse by whether it was in-store, corporate, or by-vendor (what the above example is). As anyone who has ever worked for one of these companies knows (and something that the general public needs to be aware of) each store location is completely different in the way it is run and in their daily practices based on the management and the employees of each individual store, however there is a single source of continuity between all of the stores in each individual region, and then again between all of the stores as a whole. All of the stores within each company don't have a choice but to abide by store-wide policies and procedures, regardless of what each individual manager might want to do, or what each individual situation might require. So at the top are the store-wide policies and procedures. The other source of continuity lies amongst each individual region, dictated by each individual regional manager. Each regional manager listens to corporate and then instructs both their district managers and individual store managers. Sometimes a regional manager can get special permissions from corporate to implement a certain practice or policy throughout their region, but even if this special permission is a wonderful change that helps the animals, it's not going to be implemented in all stores because that would cost corporate money. CORPORATE INFRASTRUCTURE THAT PROMOTES FINANCIAL GAIN IS GREAT FOR CORPORATIONS THAT SELL INANIMATE OBJECTS, BUT FOR CORPORATIONS THAT SELL LIVING CREATURES AND PRODUCTS THAT ARE USED TO CARE FOR LIVING CREATURES, THEY SHOULD MAKE THE WELFARE OF THE ANIMALS #1 AND FINANCIAL GAIN #2...THIS NEVER HAPPENS, NOT IN ANY OF THESE STORES, REGARDLESS OF WHAT THEY SAY.
Things have gotten much, much worse within these companies, and PETA as a whole (at least publicly) has crossed the line time and time again. As I already stated, PETA USED TO BE ABOUT HELPING ANIMALS, NOW IT'S ABOUT PUNISHING THE PEOPLE WHO HURT ANIMALS, AND THIS PHILOSOPHY IS VERY COUNTERPRODUCTIVE TO ACCOMPLISHING THEIR GOALS.
What I can tell you is that the undercover operations that are executed by not only PETA but many other organizations and individuals who are trying to expose and ultimately shut down these horrible vendors are very much real and true. And these vendors, mills, torture chambers, whatever you want to call them exist all over this country, all over the world, and range from massive warehouses that take up hundreds of acres to small, privately owned single family homes that make their livings selling to individual, local pet stores. That's right, your neighbor next door might be operating a horrible breeding facility in their basement where they continuously pump out fresh babies and make weekly to monthly drop-offs to the local pet stores you shop in. PETA has been making undercover videos of these places for decades, so have many, many other animal rights organizations, and I can assure you that these places are every bit as bad as they are portrayed to be in the videos, usually much worse. I'm not defending the illegal, immoral, violent actions of PETA extremists at all, remember I quit due to them, but posting this video above to expose the torturous vendors your local pet shops buy their live animals from and instead turning the OP's main point into a PETA-bashing thread is completely unfair, untrue, and most importantly missing the point, which is very important to me, and that is that for decades and certainly in the present day most of the Big-Box pet stores in this country continue to buy their live animals from "vendors", as the employees like to call them when asked, that abuse, neglect, torture, perform surgeries on, leave out to suffer and die, etc. the animals they sell. This is not something that PETA or anyone else invented. I wish that it was, I wish I could say "this video is just fake propaganda created by PETA to slander PetSmart", but that simply is not true. And I also promise you that if this video was taken in 2015, all that means is that this particular vendor was given changes that had to be made, either they made the changes or they were shut down, but either way PetSmart just simply found another place equally as inexpensive to buy from and equally as horrifying to buy their live animals from in that particular region. I've seen these places folks, many of them local to my home. I couldn't accurately describe them to you if I wanted to, because there aren't words that can convey the atrocities that I've seen these places commit. And the owners do this without a care in the world. The only little story I'll tell you is in a private home vendor of American Budgies I was in once, the husband and wife were showing us how they tube-fed the newly hatched babies cheaply and quickly, like they were televisions being assembled by robots on an assembly line, and the husband roughly grabbed a small baby budgie, shoved the crop tube down the baby's throat, injected the formula, and the baby had an immediate seizure and dropped over dead in his hand. He looked at his wife, she said "****", and he dropped the dead baby on the cement floor, kicked the body under the workbench, looked at us and said "Whoops, I aspirated him. There goes 10 bucks down the tubes".
I live in State College, PA, and even though Penn State University is here with 100,000 students we only have 1 pet store in town. It's a Petco. It's 5 minutes from my house, and the individual employees that work there, including the store manager.arevery friendly, knowledgeable, and experienced. I've spoken to them all several times regarding their reptile set-up, and they have to do what corporate tells them to do. So they can't use the products that they recommend and sell in their own reptile tanks. They can't put a Reptisun 10.0 UVB in the baby beardie tanks, which btw contains 10-20 3-4 week old hatchlings at the oldest. I was told that their current vendor ships them at 4 inches long. And they can't put an appropriate
UVB light on them, nor can they feed them appropriate live food, as these new hatchlings have bowls full of small mealworms...
I now drive 25 minutes to a privately owned pet store...
