Hi guys,

Just wanted to share my experience with a chain of stores named "Mesra Pet Shops"... I've been to their stores in Shah Alam and Putrajaya...

I'm most familiar with the Shah Alam one, in Sek 7 as it is near my house. Anyway my experience is that, at this particular branch, they manhandle their critters... and their staff members are very inexperienced!

They treat their cats ok, gave them a condo at the storefront and they look pampered as anything, but go to the back near the storeroom and you will find their small critters corner...

Once I saw they stuff all their rabbits (like 10+) into a small cage... at the time I thought this was probably temporary and I let go...

But recently I wanted to buy a partner for my buck (rabbit) and asked one of the Indonesian/Myanmar staff to show me one of their does... He took out one of my choosing, but then find that the opening was too small for the rabbit. Instead of gently easing the rabbit out he tried to squeeze her jugak through the small opening, squashing her belly and twisting her head this way and that, and it was HORRIFYING to watch... I was decently traumatized.

Soldiering on, I asked him to check the sex, and he said it was a female when I could CLEARLY see the testicles of the rabbit... however at the time I didn't know how to determine a rabbit's sex, so I agreed to take away the "girl" for RM25... When I arrived home, I Googled the way how to determine and confirmed that yes, it IS male, and hey, he also had a fungal infection on one of his ears...

Understandably furious, I stormed back into the shop with the boxed buck and demanded my bucks back. The guiltless staff first tried to make me trade for another rabbit, but I put my foot down and demanded that they gave me refund. Luckily for me the store was pretty busy then, and sensing that I wasn't going to back down without a fight, the staff fully refunded me.

But the fate of that rabbit is unknown... I feel sad that this could happen in a branch of a big chain store... hopefully this is an isolated case. I think, as a pet shop, the least you could do is hire staff that are more pet-friendly and could care for them with heart... I wish anyone wanting to buy pets from this store or others be more cautious of the shop's milieu before you buy, unlike me!