Mistreatment of Petstores!
I know that everyone has seen petstores where the animals weren't getting ideal care and it's very easy to assume that petstores are inherently wrong and stupid and abusing their animals...
But there are literally hundreds of great retail pet stores which deal in reptiles and have top notch animals and perfect care.
If we're going to be honest here, unless a leopard gecko is really showing signs of stress, a hide spot isn't life or death. Yes, it would ideally have one and yes, given other stresses, it can have health effects but it also makes an animal harder to sell when nobody can see it.
Water is a major issue, but even there, you'll have to be careful when judging what is and is not acceptable. Yes, water should be avaliable twenty four hours a day, seven days a week... It's not always possible though. Most retail locations will check and fill or clean water bowls two or three times a day- if you go in immediately as they open (most have people working long before that point) and there's an empty bowl here or there for the desert species simply because the person responsible for filling them hasn't gotten to that part of the store yet, there really isn't a legitimate complaint.
If every bowl is bone dry and the animals are obviously dehydrated that's a different situation. A leaky bowl here or there or the fact that someone called in sick so their work is slightly delayed isn't justification to badmouth the store or the care the animals are getting.
Since I've gone off already on the subject... the only animals which never deficate are those which aren't eating- if there's a cage here or there were something has let loose it's last meal and nobody was waiting with their hand underneath it's vent to catch it, it's not the end of the world. If the animal is sitting in three weeks worth of dried up feces, that's a different story.
Animals come with a certain degree of predictable inpredictability, you know that eventually a snake will flip over it's water dish and hide beneath it, but nobody can say exactly when this will happen and be waiting to prevent it. If there is a store with a few hundred enclosures and a few thousand animals... some of those animals will have decided that it was time to have done so.
Perhaps I'm just getting a bit sick of the holier than thou attitude of some people who seem to feel that water dishes never run dry, animals never deficate or shed and have clearly never had anything in their care die unexpectedly for reasons which could not have been determined even by a vet. There is a massive difference between a pet store where the leopard geckos have gone to the bathroom in the corner of their tank and maybe a water bowl hasn't been filled yet and one where every animal is dying of neglect.
Oh yeah... and anyone who mentions that the baby sulcattas are upsidedown is asking to be punched. The idea that there's a symbiotic relationship in the wild where pet store owners and employees follow tortoises around turning them right side up seems to be way too widespread. If you give them a few minutes, the majority will make it back over on their own. They might flip on their backs twenty minutes later again, but they manage just fine by themselves.
