An Open Letter to Leaders in the United States Pet Industry

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I know you love animals. I know you believe that you are doing everything to ensure the ones who are sold in your stores have the best care possible. You do not have to convince me otherwise. You don’t have to tell me how many years you’ve been working in this industry, or how many species you’ve cared for in your own homes during those years. I believe you.

I was the same way.  

 

What I do question is how far this compassion and self-proclaimed love extends when it comes to company profits. How you can continue to justify keeping sentient beings in small plastic cups on shelves—in many cases for the rest of their lives. How you can write off dozens of individuals that arrive to stores dead after a rough or lengthy transport simply as “live loss” because it’s still within the acceptable bounds of a certain metric. How you can convince yourselves that keeping a little brown canary in a 2’x1’ cage under florescent lights for 13 months—until she becomes egg bound and passes away when customers continue to ignore her for not being yellow—represents anything remotely close to what a bird’s life should be.

 

I worked in management positions over the course of a decade at various Pet Supplies Plus, Petco, and Petsmart locations across the country—from California to New York. I know that this type of treatment is not unique to one store or even one company. Indeed, there are dozens of other stories and examples I could provide that prove otherwise. It is a condition of corporate greed, plain and simple. However, it doesn’t have to be this way—there are solutions! The most logical answer that comes to mind is for pet stores to stop selling live animals altogether and instead partner with local rescues and shelters for adoption opportunities. This way, stores can still sell the products that make up the vast majority of their profits (speaking from experience, live animal sales typically count for less than five percent of net profit), and countless animals will find new homes. It’s wonderful that so many companies have become aware of the horrors of puppy mills and have stopped selling dogs and cats (and in some places rabbits and guinea pigs). However—birds, hamsters, fishes, reptiles, and so on are also bred in similar conditions and do not receive the same attention. Shelters are full of these individuals, and they all deserve the same quality of care.    

 

I know you love animals. Now please show us.  

 

Respectfully,

 

Lindsay Marzulla

MS, Anthrozoology

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