PetSmart Suspends All Bird Sales Following Outbreak

It’s too bad that it required an outbreak of a disease that’s contagious to humans for PetSmart to make this decision, but this is something we’ve been asking the pet store chain to do for a long time now. According to The Huntsville Times PetSmart has stopped selling birds in all of its stores for the moment while it looks into the outbreak of psittacosis that has affected the birds it gets from various suppliers. And now that they’ve taken this step of removing these animals from the sales floor, we want to do everything we can to make sure things stay that way. One has to wonder what is happening with all of the sick birds as we speak?

Like all animals exploited by the pet trade, exotic birds sold at pet stores like PetSmart are raised in conditions that are designed to be the most profitable for breeders, which means that they are often crowded inside sheds, barns, and garages without any regard for their basic needs or the dangers of spreading infection and disease. No one should be surprised when this sort of thing happens in a pet store. It should be obvious to anyone who knows anything about birds—the very symbol of freedom—that keeping them confined in cages is cruel in the extreme, and PetSmart should never have been selling these wild animals in the first place. You can click here to learn more about our campaign against PetSmart and contact the company about its lousy track record of animal sales.