Photo: My Pet Monsters...

[HLFB]

Hello all,

After searching for a few months and coming up with nothing, I finally found some axies in a moment of pure serendipity at a local pet store recently. We had a few issues with feeding for the first few days, due to my lack of experience and the fact that they were both full of gravel. Everything is fine now and they are both eating like pigs, well they just play with earthworms and get frustrated with them but they eat the pellets and bloodworms no problem.

Haven't decided on any names yet and may wait till they are sexable, you can see the gill growth in the one with the yellow dots on it's side, these pics were taken less than a week apart. So amazing these little guys....

The day I got them.... don't mind the mess, we were still learning how to feed.

...and just a few days later you can notice the improvement in the gills....

...and the other little guy checking out the yard to it's new open concept bunglalow...

Thanks for lookin!

Mat.

 

[Georgimw]

Naww gorgeous axolotls glad they have someone to take care of them... bungalow and all! spoilt! pains me to see them mistreated at the petshops.... evil!

 

[HLFB]

Naww gorgeous axolotls glad they have someone to take care of them... bungalow and all! spoilt! pains me to see them mistreated at the petshops.... evil!

Thanks for the compliments

I can't speak about any pet shops other than this one, as far as axolotls go, but I'd say their issue is more laziness and lack of preparation.

I had initially planned to reserve them and pick them up in a week or so, to give my tank time to cycle properly and get a few questions asked about feeding here. When I paid for them though the shops fish room guy tells me I don't have to cycle the tank, they didn't, I should keep them on gravel to help with the cycling and that they would give me " a bit of something" from their filter.

I picked them up two days later.

After I found a very large piece of their (the stores) gravel in my tank (gravel they swore up and down they couldn't eat and tried to sell me) I informed them that they were in fact eating it. Went back the next day to get some crickets for my frogs and nothing had changed. On the plus side though my crickets came already gut loaded, I discovered this when I removed them from the bag and found large chew holes all over the egg carton ....

Never before have I considered opening a shop myself, because you end up having to markup your livestock to cover overhead and you just end up a bloody Exo Terra dealer and cricket middleman...... But now I'm starting to think that with enough word of mouth and happy customers, a pet shop that sells HEALTHY animals might be able to turn a profit. I think one of the biggest turn offs for the regular Joe when it comes to the pet trade is how much failure they have experienced. They are set up to fail with misinformation and faulty products, so they see the entire industry as a bit of a scam.

I would have to think breeders are sick and tired of dealing with lazy people who end up abusing or neglecting the animals as well. It's one of the main reasons I have put all my boa breeding plans on hold indefinitely. It is just too hard to find a proper home for a goldfish these days, so trying to place even one litter of boas just doesn't seem logical to me anymore. "Doesn't fit into my breeding plans anymore" is not really in my vocabulary either so now I have quite a few "pet" boas and may have to breed rats just to keep them.

I'm hoping that I will be able to get my frogs, and possibly Axolotls in the future, into good situations by bringing my own display to a few local stores and offering a care guide I print myself that I can include in the cost. It would be nice if my tax dollars went to enforce the animal cruelty laws that we already have here, but in the meantime I have a plan, and maybe a shop of my own soon.

As our friends from the UK say, I guess I'll stop my "whinging" now... (Been watching An Idiot Abroad ....love when Ricky says "whinging"....I want if for my cell phone ringer )

Mat.

 

[Cynth]

Cute Axolotl! I love that terracotta house in the last picture.