Cass, I feel your pain, when it comes to pet stores abusing their animals. There in a pet store near my house, in Milwaukee, this place is huge!! It's called Hoffer's Tropical Life Pets. I love the store for the fact that it is so huge, I could spend hours browsing around and daydreaming about tons of stuff. They have a small animal section, and they have to have AT LEAST 150 rats. There are about 25 aquariums with anywhere from two to 25 rats in one tank. All of the tanks have nursing does in there with pinkies. In the tank along with the does and pups are her previous litter/s and the buck! They have just about every color you could imagine, including hairless rats.

It really makes me sad when I see all those rats crammed into one tank. It grosses me out to think that all those rats are incest and sisters and brothers breed. S-I-C-K.

One thing that really disturbed me is the animals kept away from the customers view. When my friend and I were there a couple of weeks ago, a man and his kids came in and bought a rat- these people were *so* stupid...anyways...so a worker goes in the backroom to get the rat out of the tank. My friend and I watch the worker pick the rat up by the tail and carry it back through the door over to the people. It gets even more sick....the worker forgot to put the cloth backdrop down- so we could see through the glass into the backroom. To our horror there are cages stacked about three high full of chinchillas, kittens, rats, you name it. They are in a dark room, never given any attention, and their living conditions are HORRENDUS. I was ready to cry when I saw those animals. It hit me really hard, because you'd never expect such a modest up-scale looking pet store to do that.

I feel so bad now that I saw that. I never really was disgusted with the pet store before I saw the backroom. Now that I saw the backroom, I am really disgusted- they can do better than that. I mean Hoffer's is not your little local pet store with some occasional products. Hoffer's has every single pet product imaginable, the store is HUGE...you have to see this place...it is the Prada of pet stores. It's a shame such a posh pet store doesn't care for its animals to well.