Recently I went into the Petco at Littleton and Crestline. While my boyfriend was shopping for dog food, I fell a little in love with a young female rat, and asked to see her. The blond lady who came to open the cage asked if I was absolutely sure I was going to buy her. I was astonished by the question, but I answered honestly – of course I wasn’t positive, but I was still interested. I was even more astonished when the lady launched into a very nasty lecture about how she couldn’t let me hold the rat unless my buying it depended on it – for example, only if I had to make sure first that she wouldn’t bite me. She said that it put too much stress on the animals. The woman treated me like I was a pesky kid wanting to hold all the animals, and it made my Petco experience a very humiliating and upsetting one. The most upsetting part was that I might have decided to buy the rat, had I held her and felt there was a connection between us – but that woman denied me the opportunity to find out.
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