I went to a pet store recently, one of the few in my city, because they had bunnies for sale. I had no intention of actually buying a rabbit. There's no way I can afford it at the moment, nor do I really have the space at home for one, but I thought it might be fun to at least look at the rabbits and dream about taking one home with me some day.

When I left the store, my thoughts were not on the rabbits. I was thinking instead of the overcrowded birdcages, the seven rats crammed in a cage that should really only have had 2 at the most, and the 8 ferrets that were in a cage that was probably intended as a rather spacious cage for 3-4 rats. The overcrowding was obvious, and painful to look at.

I wished I could bring home about half of the animals, just so they could have some breathing room.

There is a fine line between allowing animals to socialize with their own kind and crowding too many into one area. A single animal can tip the balance and turn friendly fun into frustrated fighting. When animals have to clamber over 2 of their cage mates just to turn around, as the poor ferrets did, there's a problem.

The problem is not just limited to that one pet store, not by a long shot. Pet stores are notorious for overcrowding and poor animal hygiene, and the reason is simple, if sad and disgusting. The stores often care more about the money they can make from the animals than they do about the animals themselves. Who cares if too many mice are crammed into too small a cage? Their sole purpose is to make that store some profit.

A friend of mine worked in a pet store for a while, and brought home some truly horrific stories about the way the animals were treated. Sick animals, especially. If they were sick, sometimes they would be given medicine, but just as often they'd be separated from the rest of their cagemates and left to die, with at best a few halfhearted attempts to treat them. I'll never forget a story she told me about a hamster that had wet tail, a disease that often affects small rodents and causes severe diarrhea and dehydration. It was kept out back, in a separate cage, so that the infection would not spread. Every day, my friend fed that hamster the easy-to-acquire medication to treat the disease, and got water into its mouth by the aid of an eye-dropper, to help rehydrate it. It was getting better. After a few days it was able to move around again, was no longer so weak and thin and dehydrated, and was making attempts to eat once more. Then came my roommate's days off.

She came back two days later. The hamster had died. Nobody in the store had made an attempt to care for it.

You may think that if the store sees the animals as only existing for profit, that they would be more inclined to take better care of their charges. The fact of the matter is that the loss of a small animal like a rodent is a trifling loss to them, and more people will always bring in more. Most pet stores will accept "donations" of unwanted pets, especially small ones like mice, rats, or hamsters, because it represents profit to them at little to no cost. And if the animsl end up dying, then it was no great loss to them. Pet stores make very little profit from the animals themselves, and more from the supplies they sell. Unless the animal can bring in a decently large profit (such as cats, dogs, and lizards), they aren't, in the store's eyes, that useful. The care of fish and small animals falls by the wayside.

If you've ever gone into a pet store and seen the rodents chewing on the bars of their cages, that's the first sign that things might not be all right there. Rodents do need to chew on things, yes, because their front teeth don't stop growing, and the gnawing helps grind them down so they don't become too large. Often a rodent will gnaw on the bars of its cage because they are provided with nothing else to chew. A stick, a small block of wood, anything like that is good for them to gnaw on to prevent their teeth from getting too long, but it's a rare pet store that bothers to provide these things. They also tend to gnaw when they're stressed and bored. I've raised a few rats over the years, and the only time I've ever seen one of my rats gnaw on the bars of his cage was when he was old, sick, and about to die. They were kept entertained with toys, they had plenty of wood to gnaw at, and they were happy. When one is aware of this, it's a sharp contrast from what is often seen at pet stores.

But the majority of small rodents are bought to feed snakes, not to be actual pets. Likely it's hard to give much consideration to animals that are just going to end up in a snake's belly in a week or so anyway. (Yes, I am bitter and cynical about this. And I wish fervently that I hadn't actually seen signs and heard stories to indicate that this is the pervading attitude in pet stores these days.)

Hamsters, cute and fluffy as they are, suffer particularly badly from pet store treatment. Much like rats and mice, they need things to gnaw on and frequently grow bored, but unlike rats and mice, hamsters are not social creatures. They are fairly solitary, and putting them in cages with other hamsters creates tension, which often escalates into fights and even death. Females who have just given birth have been known to eat their young because of the stress and overcrowding of cages.

I have seen birds who are clearly sick, tails drooping, head dropped, eyes dull. No attempt was made to remove them from display. I'm not even sure if the employees of the store recognised the signs that the birds were ill in the first place.

Some stores are better than others. I consider myself quite fortunate to live in a city with a very good pet store, though it is in a somewhat inconvenient location. Rodents are not overcrowded in cages. Birds are bright-eyed and affectionate. Cats and dogs are often taken outside and put in small kennels during the good weather, so that they're not cooped up indoors all day. This is often more important for dogs than for cats, but the extra effort the staff goes to is seen and felt through the whole store. I wish more pet stores could be like this, could be places where the owners and employees care more for the animals than for their own paycheques. This is the kind of store I want to give my money to.

But even when I'm in there, I can't help but feel a pang of regret for all the animals that aren't. The ones who are in chain pets stores, who have caretakers that don't know how to take care of them, who are sometimes stressed to the point of dying. No creature should have to live that way. As humans, we'd refuse to put up with that kind of treatment, and I hate to see that some of us are so willing to force it on others, creatures who may not be as intelligent but are no less alive.