My pet store adventure yesterday...

So yesterday I asked my boyfriend if we could drive out to the nearest LFS to my school which is about five miles away on the highway. They're one of those places that overcrowds everything and has way too much stock and not enough employees to monitor everything. But they have some really beautiful snakes which seem healthy enough despite being in cramped enclosures with no hides, not enough humidity to shed properly and pooped in water bowls... They were keeping around 25 full-grown hamsters in a ten gallon tank and had another ten gallon full of baby alligators that must have been a foot long each already. As for fish, I witnessed the absolute horror of an eight-inch pleco being eaten alive by a tiny Black Labeo.


And then I went to the bettas. They seemed to be all from the same spawn and possible bred there, because they all had very long ventrals, had dragonscale characteristics, were varying shades of blue marble and platinum white and looked like they were either very beautiful young veiltails or plakats. Very, very beautiful but swimming in a fog of methylene blue so it was hard to tell the exact colors. One of them had a gill abscess that stuck out almost half and inch, one was missing his entire dorsal fin and looked like he was getting close to having body rot, many of them had clamped fins so I couldn't tell the state of their fins, and one was floating upside down, gasping for air. When I picked up the little dude with the SBD, he tried to attack my fingers, flaring and begging for food like a little monster.

It was so endearing that I decided I would attempt to rescue the one with the swim bladder and went to get a critter keeper. It took me less than a minute to come back to the bettas and discover that one of the employees had taken the sick fish away. I saw him come out of a back room with an empty cup. I can only assume he dumped the fish alive, which made me feel absolutely atrocious. I immediately set down my purchases and left the store.

So I went to Petsmart to get the gravel that I wanted even though the LFS was cheaper and discovered there was a betta sale going on. Buy any bowl or tank under 5 gallons and get a betta half off. I wasn't tempted until I reached way in the back and pulled out the boy I had taken back two weeks before. He looked sad and a bit tattered and more colorless than when I had had him, so I snatched him up. I bought gravel, bought a 2.5 gallon tank, and took him home.

My baby <3

Long story short, never let me visit pet stores because I am a sentimental mess.