Hi folks, I’m wondering who I could go to to report a pet shop? I’m thinking the consumer affairs center but I’d appreciate if anyone has any other info about this sort of thing.
To give context, I recently bought a leopard gecko from a sort of shitty pet shop because they don’t do reptile rescue in Japan basically at all and because this particular pet shop was the only one where the owner even acknowledged my existence as a foreigner much less actually engaged with me. However, I didn’t realize it at the time because it’s my first time getting any kind of reptile as a pet, but my gecko has metabolic bone disease which is due to poor nutrition and bad living conditions (tank temperature and humidity, etc). I went back yesterday out of curiosity and there’s a gecko there with really advanced MBD so I think this guy just doesn’t supplement with necessary vitamins. He also doesn’t keep them in the right conditions at all (no heat, no substrate), and this wasn’t the case when I went but all their water was dirty and their boxes were full of uncleaned poo. I pointed out that the gecko had MBD and he was like “oh I’m totally giving him the right supplements but Americans sold him to me and they breed them wrong so he can’t absorb vitamin D” (which is funny because a) why buy the badly bred American gecko then? and b) American standards of breeding and care are miles above Japan). There is no genetic condition that prevents a gecko from absorbing vitamin D so he’s just not supplementing his reptiles correctly. I suspect he killed the gecko in question after that since it’s not sellable and is a waste of money 😞
I know Japan doesn’t care about pet shops in general so the idea isn’t to shut down his pet shop and all pet shops or whatever but I do think he’s doing something if not illegal at least worth having some authority look into by doing neglect to the point of permanently disfiguring his animals. Any advice would be appreciated!
by eternalcatlady