If you are located in Buffalo, NY, do not go to Steve's Wonderful World of Pets. They get their animals from pet mills known for abusing their critters. That and they have been known to mislabel them. For example, I got what I was told was a New Mexico Desert Tortoise. I named him Shelldon. I fed him what I was supposed to and kept him under a heat lamp like I was supposed to. Almost 3 years later my friend took him to a reptile show and discovered he was actually a Russian Turtle. He was kept under a heat lamp for so long that his skin crisped and the color was drained from his shell. Due to Steve's Pets fuck-up, I spent 3 years unknowingly abusing the poor guy and I could have gone to prison or gotten a heavy fine. Russian Turtles are illegal to own in the US. If it wasn't for the extreme resilience of the Russian Turtle, he could have died under such treatment. I gave Shelldon to a good friend who nursed him back to health and he now looks as he should. If he died because of their fuck-up, I personally would have strangled Steve to death. Shelldon was my baby.
Unfortunately, this is the case for almost all pet stores. I'm pretty sure the majority of pet stores get their puppies from puppy mills. And I once went to PetCo and they were selling Russian Turtles. Shame, really.
I don't understand how people don't research their animals before they bring them home to take care of.
Yes the store is in the wrong for doing this in the first place but customers have to research critters before they bring them home.
Maybe they look a lot more similar when they are smaller but the pictures that I have looked at they look rather different.
If I'm going to bring a new animal home I'm not going to simply research a single breed of that animal. I'm going to research as many breeds as I can to be sure that I'm bringing home what I was intending to bring home.
*I didn't intend to come off rude, I haven't had my coffee yet. This is just where I stand on these kind of situations. I think both the shop and the customer did their part for this kind of incident to happen.
Most customer review websites have a few idiots that assume that at, at face value, any pet store with puppies is buying from puppy mills.
I've worked for many pet stores and I've seen people point that finger even when we didn't even sell dogs!
Quite often, actually, small businesses will buy from local breeders. It keeps costs down and you'll have a greater proportion of AKC and CKC registered breeds and smaller amounts of breeding females. (I think AKC says it has to be fewer than 3 breeding females.)
And as for reptiles: You're a moron.
Firstly, it's "Russian tortoise." Not a fucking turtle. Not even a land turtle. A tortoise. There is no such thing as a Russian turtle. Before you even walk into a pet store to buy an exotic animal, especially a reptile, you should do your research to be accurately identify it and recognize inconsistencies in identification and care. Furthermore, you should talk to the employees to gauge whether or not they have a clue about the individual creature. The reptile pet trade between breeders and retail pet stores is a fuck-all mess. Breeders send the wrong, misidentified animals ALL THE TIME, usually because they are overworked and understaffed trying to meet demands of a growing industry. Additionally, people that have a clue how to identify the huge diversity of reptiles down to the mark, especially if the animal is young and/or wild-caught, do not work in retail pet stores - the compensation is shit - so that's all on you. Every reptile-care website you visit will tell you the exact same thing.
[I, of course, am the exception. ]
He was kept under a heat lamp for so long that his skin crisped and the color was drained from his shell. Due to Steve's Pets fuck-up, I spent 3 years unknowingly abusing the poor guy and I could have gone to prison or gotten a heavy fine. Russian Turtles are illegal to own in the US.
Okay, since I've already addressed that it's a Russian tortoise, they are not illegal in the States. I know they're restricted in some localities, but they're legal to own and transport across state borders (maybe with exceptions, but I'm pretty sure they're nationally available, offhand.) However, I know that the desert tortoise is illegal to house (for over 30 days or something) in at least one of its native states, as there aren't many breeders out there so they're often wild-caught and don't adapt to captivity well. So... that's one red flag, yeah?
Also, you obviously had no idea how to house the thing. Just because you thought it was a desert tortoise doesn't mean you can scorch the thing. Desert tortoises, like most other desert reptiles, spend the majority of their life underground, where it is relatively cool and moist. They only come out to eat at night or dusk, when things are still cool.
And, perhaps even more basic, you should have created a heat gradient across the cage, so, in the event it was too much for him to take, he could have moved out of it and gotten away from the intense light and heat. (This also would have helped him dodge the overexposure to UVB if you set the desert terrarium up to proper specs for the region.)
And let me just say, just because some fuckwit at a reptile show told you something different doesn't mean that they're right. In this case, a Russian is a common, easy ID, so he was probably right, but I mean this in the most general sense. They let anybody who pays for a space into those things. Where, again, it's your responsibility to confirm everything the seller says, and it's your responsibility to check into the business as much as you can BEFORE you bring home your new animal.
So, I say again: you're a moron. You clearly had no idea what you were getting into.
The discoloration your talking about is more often the result of having the incorrect UVB input onto the animal. This most often occurs because some jackass who thought it would be cool to own a turtle/tortoise didn't think to read up on the animal, thus they set up a bare-minimum cage and didn't purchase a UVB light fixture.
Given that you seem like an uneducated fuckwit, I'm willing to bank on that being a major factor in how you nearly killed your tortoise.
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