PetSmart Managers Charged With Cruelty After PETA Exposé, Police Raid
On March 29, 2018, Metro Nashville Animal Care & Control (MACC) executed a search-and-seizure warrant at the PetSmart store on Sawyer Brown Road in Nashville, Tennessee.
This occurred after PETA had provided law-enforcement officials with video footage and photographs of systemic neglect and widespread animal suffering documented by an eyewitness who had worked at the store as part of an investigation of PetSmart stores across the country. MACC seized six sick and injured hamsters, mice, and guinea pigs and opened a criminal investigation.
On April 13, 2018, the Nashville District Attorney’s Office filed cruelty-to-animals charges against PetSmart store managers Gregory Gordon, Kris Stengel, and Tonya Smith.
Managers at the Nashville store repeatedly refused to provide sick, injured, and dying animals with veterinary care in order to “keep costs down” so that they would receive bonuses. These animals included a guinea pig who suffered from an abscessed wound on his back, dehydration, and painful gastrointestinal stasis; a guinea pig whose abscessed knee joint had spread infection to his heart, brain, and elsewhere; and a mouse who languished for more than a month with an irritated eye and apparent respiratory infection before he died.
The eyewitness also recorded a supervisor instructing employees not to tell customers that PetSmart buys animals from Sun Pet, Ltd., an abusive Atlanta warehouse that was put on probation by the Georgia Department of Agriculture following a PETA investigation in 2010.
PETA’s investigation—which also included stores in Brandon, Florida, and Peoria, Arizona—revealed that PetSmart stocked animals with diseases, including ringworm and coccidiosis, that are transmissible to children and other humans and that it didn’t schedule staff to care for animals on Thanksgiving and Christmas, even though many of them were sick and in need of medication and the company has an annual revenue of $7 billion.
At the PetSmart store on Causeway Boulevard in Brandon, Florida, managers left animals to languish on the shelves during Hurricane Irma, and workers returned four days later to find that several had escaped, others had died, and approximately 30 small mammals had run out of water. Additionally, workers deprived a critically ill parakeet of veterinary care for at least five days as the animal starved, suffered from dehydration, and slowly died—and a manager admitted that “every single one” of the animals comes from “terrible” mills and that PetSmart is “a horrible place for animals.” Florida law-enforcement officials are investigating the Brandon PetSmart store.
A supervisor at the Peoria, Arizona, store near the company’s Phoenix headquarters told the eyewitness that workers didn’t take sick and injured animals for free in-store veterinary exams because “they don’t want animals [in a back room] to take care of.” Solitary hamster species were housed in groups, leading to fights, and a supervisor advised “grab[bing]” any hamster who killed others and “squeez[ing] as hard as you can” to kill the animal, while another worker referred to a stressed hamster as a “[d]umb bitch” and asked the animal, “What the fuck is wrong with you?” The eyewitness was also instructed not to inform customers that the store was selling fish suffering from ich, a highly contagious disease.
After seven exposés revealing the abusive conditions endured by animals bred for sale at big-box pet store chains, we urge all guardians who care about their animals to buy supplies only from retailers that don’t sell animals.
Learn more about how PetSmart corporate policies encourage abuse of small animals on The PETA Podcast:
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Please join us in letting PetSmart know that you’ll no longer shop for your animal companion at its stores and that, until it ends animal sales, you, your family, and your friends will never set foot in one of its stores again.
