trigger warning for those sensitive to animal cruelty, the details in this article are really gross, so please proceed with caution, but: TL;DR Coo and Riku are being accused by customers + former employees to be running breeding mills with extra bad conditions, to then sell unhealthy baby animals to customers.
for those of you who are able to stomach these kinds of details, I’ll talk about some of the points mentioned in the article:
Coo and Riku, the biggest pet store chain in Japan, with over 200 locations throughout the country, are being accused of running at least 11 breeding mills where they hold down female animals, willing or not, and just have male dogs have at them. These breeding mills are also truly filthy, as former employees note: there’s rats and cockroaches in each of the mills, and these mills are so understaffed that not all poop is cleaned up at the end of each night, and so the animals eat the poop, get infectious diseases, which then spread to the other animals in the mill.
Due to the horrible conditions these animals live in, and are forced to conceive their babies in, the babies who are sold in the stores often have horrible diseases like parovirus and hip dysplasia, and according to customers whose pets were purchased from Coo and Riku reported: “when we tried to report these sudden appearance of symptoms to store managers, we were told ‘we can’t pay for treatment, but we can replace the dog’ why would the manager think I would want to exchange my baby just because they’re sick?” there was another customer who told journalists, when they tried to report their respective pet’s parovirus to the store, the store manager replied saying “that’s impossible for the pet to have gotten parovirus here, because we don’t have parovirus at our store.” the pet passed away unfortunately, and when this second customer asked the animal hospital doctor about the Coo and Riku’s manager’s claims, the doctor replied saying, “due to the incubation period, there was no doubt the parovirus was contracted while the animal was in the store’s care.”
Truly bad stuff, many more details within the article if you want to learn more, and for those of you who are not yet/unable to read Japanese, DeepL or Google Translate were both able to help me piece together what was going on.
if you want a quicker version to share with family and friends, Takizawe, a popular Japanese Twitter/X account who posts about hot button news topics about Japan, made a post about this story [here](https://twitter.com/takigare3/status/1700416750935036301)
Any country that still has pet stores including the ones you see here at Kojima, etc. are not going to have humane treatment of animals behind the scenes unfortunately
I hope that people can get their pets from more humane sources, but I just don’t see those options readily available in Japan. I *think* there’s one shelter in my prefecture, and while there are plenty of stray cats someone could start caring for, I haven’t seen a single stray dog, so if someone really wants a dog, they’ll probably just go to a pet store anyways.
We’ve bought two dogs from them over the time I’ve lived here, basically to rescue them from that place. They both had health problems as puppies that needed veterinary treatment despite Coo & Riku having certified them as healthy at the time we bought them. Clearly, neither of them were. They’ve had so many scandals over time it’s hard to believe the government hasn’t shut them down by now.
Johnny diddling kids, Japanese pet stores abusing animals… is it “things everyone has known for decades” month or something?
6 comments
trigger warning for those sensitive to animal cruelty, the details in this article are really gross, so please proceed with caution, but: TL;DR Coo and Riku are being accused by customers + former employees to be running breeding mills with extra bad conditions, to then sell unhealthy baby animals to customers.
for those of you who are able to stomach these kinds of details, I’ll talk about some of the points mentioned in the article:
Coo and Riku, the biggest pet store chain in Japan, with over 200 locations throughout the country, are being accused of running at least 11 breeding mills where they hold down female animals, willing or not, and just have male dogs have at them. These breeding mills are also truly filthy, as former employees note: there’s rats and cockroaches in each of the mills, and these mills are so understaffed that not all poop is cleaned up at the end of each night, and so the animals eat the poop, get infectious diseases, which then spread to the other animals in the mill.
Due to the horrible conditions these animals live in, and are forced to conceive their babies in, the babies who are sold in the stores often have horrible diseases like parovirus and hip dysplasia, and according to customers whose pets were purchased from Coo and Riku reported: “when we tried to report these sudden appearance of symptoms to store managers, we were told ‘we can’t pay for treatment, but we can replace the dog’ why would the manager think I would want to exchange my baby just because they’re sick?” there was another customer who told journalists, when they tried to report their respective pet’s parovirus to the store, the store manager replied saying “that’s impossible for the pet to have gotten parovirus here, because we don’t have parovirus at our store.” the pet passed away unfortunately, and when this second customer asked the animal hospital doctor about the Coo and Riku’s manager’s claims, the doctor replied saying, “due to the incubation period, there was no doubt the parovirus was contracted while the animal was in the store’s care.”
Truly bad stuff, many more details within the article if you want to learn more, and for those of you who are not yet/unable to read Japanese, DeepL or Google Translate were both able to help me piece together what was going on.
if you want a quicker version to share with family and friends, Takizawe, a popular Japanese Twitter/X account who posts about hot button news topics about Japan, made a post about this story [here](https://twitter.com/takigare3/status/1700416750935036301)
Any country that still has pet stores including the ones you see here at Kojima, etc. are not going to have humane treatment of animals behind the scenes unfortunately
I hope that people can get their pets from more humane sources, but I just don’t see those options readily available in Japan. I *think* there’s one shelter in my prefecture, and while there are plenty of stray cats someone could start caring for, I haven’t seen a single stray dog, so if someone really wants a dog, they’ll probably just go to a pet store anyways.
In a country with pet cafés (even for wild animals), monkeys on a leash at many markets / parks, very few organic meat, and not even caring about human’s comfort, pet stores are cruel? How surprising!
We’ve bought two dogs from them over the time I’ve lived here, basically to rescue them from that place. They both had health problems as puppies that needed veterinary treatment despite Coo & Riku having certified them as healthy at the time we bought them. Clearly, neither of them were. They’ve had so many scandals over time it’s hard to believe the government hasn’t shut them down by now.
Johnny diddling kids, Japanese pet stores abusing animals… is it “things everyone has known for decades” month or something?