One small place we go for dog food - expensive tinned as well as dry, and we're in every week - carries fish; I'd previously dragged the (obviously overburdened) owner/manager back where Bettas were kept in tiny hang-on fry bins on the depressing sale tanks - dead, sick, dying, one betta crammed in with a fungused dead fish and an oto somehow trapped in there as well, although barely room to move.
Nightmare stuff...
Stood there and, as politely (I hope) as possible prevented her - temporarily - from rapidly tossing into the garbage any that I noticed moved, but she did say she was in the process of cutting back on her fish section, (this my addition, not hers) since the fish were so grossly uncared for.
Obviously I never bought fish there, but they carry an unusual, hard-to-find brand of tinned food, which I feed my dog, and are handy, so we go there specifically for that, and sometimes I just have to wander into the fish section for a look.
Went in later to look at the (vastly improved) smaller fish section, Bettas scattered hither and yon in small glass globes/vases, thought one was dead, picked up its container and it moved - in a flurry of odd, white (looked like tiny fragments of bleached plant matter, but no plants) and probably gill-clogging particles, and all were like that; girl working said that was OK because they were just fed (? no normal poop at all, in any of them, just tons of white particles) and would have waterchanges tomorrow. (And I wonder what they were changing that water WITH. 'You change with you, and you, with you,' like the old, sick underwear joke?)
Stated that if she could point me toward conditioned water supply, I'd change the water: she said she wasn't allowed to do it herself, but that water was, eventually, changed before I left, as it was obvious I simply wasn't leaving until then.
(They must have just hated me, and it was, I suppose, pretty rude and intrusive of me, although I did try to be as pleasant and tactful as poss. - I just wasn't leaving till that was done, so they'd maybe think in future: this matters.
But it appears nobody working there likes fish: one girl thought it was gross when I picked up a 'disgusting' Nerite snail she wouldn't touch...
And - with this caveat due to my chronic lack of sleep and currently astoundingly bad memory - a girl I'm sure is the same one who'd stated that she didn't want to and avoided caring for fish on her shift, in a store where no-one cared, is the only person who's ever in my entire life told me I'd need to bring in a water sample if returning a sick/dead fish, when I asked about the WCM mentioned below, with potential Mycobacteriosis.)
Anyway, (prior to the above,) big and consistent improvement, so much I actually bought some nice, healthy Amano-type shrimp (sold as 'algae shrimp', look and act like them, although no idea if actual Amanos but hoping they're the freshwater look-alikes) and Nerites, went back for more snails.
Then a little later bought 6 White Cloud Mountain Minnows there, got part-way home before noticing one was severely deformed, like one of those old-fashioned ribbon Xmass candies.
It was seriously horrifying: that poor little thing.
Went back, and, after some unsatisfactory dealings with the cashier, was told by the (psychic?) owner that it was not mycobacterial ( actually apparently a common problem in WCM's,) and that it was OK because a lot of them were deformed.
After a long perusal of what was a grossly malformed fish in the bag with the others, she grudgingly said that she could take it out, if I wanted, putting me in the position of worrying that the fish would wind up gasping to death in the garbage.
The only moral course of action was to swallow the ($4 or more) loss, humanely clove oil the affected fish, and watch the others for signs of problems.
(I stopped at the cashier desk on the way out, to ensure I'd get a refund if the lot of them died within the next week or two, which is when I received the abovementioned response.)
And between the previous 'care' given the fish and being told that it's OK for her to sell people deformed and possibly contagious fish at full price, even just from a value-for-dollar viewpoint - how many other customers for fish has she lost on a permanent basis?
But she doesn't and apparently can't make even that connection.
If people don't have the capacity to care about masses of fish continually suffering and dying, they aren't going to care about (the I'd consider lesser concern of) customer satisfaction or even repeat business.
And, unfortunately, about all you can generally do is to refuse to support the worst of them by buying live animals so grossly abused, after drawing as high-level attention - ideally in as civil a fashion as possible - as you can to the problem.
On the other hand, the small, privately owned LFS I usually buy fish from provides clean tanks on which people are always working - and have evidently been sent a lot of sick fish lately.
(Most of the girls working there don't seem to be allowed by their parents to have fish; one girl told me a little Betta guy I later bought, who had some very short, stubby rays with huge black, burnt-looking blobs on top, didn't have fin-rot, 'he's just like that' and I couldn't get him just then, as the Betta I got that day was going in with an Endler-cross 'feeder' guppy, this being the guppy's little 5 gal., and had to be healthy.
But, informed or not, people work so hard there taking care of the fish, etc. it's hard getting help for humans - a much better state than the reverse.)
And, after buying a number of healthy fish there previously, I've lately bought (among others) two apparently stunted, sick little bettas there who are feeling and looking much, much better now, and have joined the elite group (Mum talking here) of the now 6 most beautiful bettas in MY little world...
Quite a variance in these examples, even if the result of winding up with sick fish is the same...
).
hahaha
