11/30/15 An Anonymous Report
I started working at the pet shop HOP d.o.o. on March 3, 2014.
At first, all employees were assigned to different departments, and I was not allowed to stay among animal cages for long. However, I was allowed to go into the storage room behind the aquarium. It took me several days to notice a discarded box placed on top of a dustbin bag. When I looked inside, I saw a dozen of hamsters in it. Everbody refused to give me an answer as to why there is a horde of hamsters crammed into a small box where they have no light, food, or water. Everybody said they knew nothing! As I was insisting, I found out that the hamsters were a mum and her babies, that they were born in the store, but were not entered into official records because they were a surplus. Since HOP does not have a licence for breeding, they crammed them into the small box, made holes in it, and kept them there beacuse they could not be in regular cages. They were regularly getting out of the boxes and running around the store. Some of them got caught, some only after they became exhausted from thirst and died. I was the only one who fed them, others did not care.
It took me a long time to get a permission to take all those hamsters out of the store, at least the ones that survived.
Some of them caught a virus and died, or had to be put down. All had the same symptoms, balance and eating disorders, but nobody wanted to admit that the disease was spreading.
The supplier, the Zoo Oaza store, sent us already sick animals. A couple of them died immediately, and I took one sow to my place and had her treated at my own expense because HOP refused to treat their animals. I took her to the Buba veterinary clinic where she was diagnosed with scab. In the end, the sow had to be put down, and HOP's animal supplier continued sending animals suffering from scab, microsporidiosis, and other diseases.
Rabbits were also sick. I convinced HOP's veterinarians to treat some of them, and others I had treated at my own expense again.
There was an agreement between the veterinarians and employees to sell a sick animal, and when a buyer would come after a few days and complain that the animal is sick, sometimes the staff would agree to a free treatment, but more often than not they would claim that the animal got sick after it was sold, which was a lie.
Since HOP does not pay it's suppliers, the food for the animals on sale is often scarce. Now, things are even worse.
The animals are starved, their stalls are dirty and have no shelters, they get to the store sick or become sick and die... When I worked there, I brought shelters, and now they are gone again. So, they do not have basic living conditions.
Since I do not work there anymore, the minimum of the care that they did allow is now gone:
- The stalls are not built adequately so birds and hamsters run around the store. A pair of parrots went missing and were never found.
- There are insufficient staff employed so they do not have time to feed and take care of all animals.
- HOP does not have enough money or does not want to pay for food so animals are starved.
The supplier for HOP is the Zoo Oaza pet shop from Nova Gradiska. They send sick or not grown enough animals which results in death. Almost all rabbits have scab or fungal parasites, and hamsters have scab. Both have upper respiratory tract infection. The hamsters have eye infections. It is a breeding establishment of horrors!
We need to put an end to both HOP and ZOO OAZA and they need to be punished!
HOP is now moving to two new premises, Stenjevec and Dubec, and they do not even take care of the animals they have now. They do not feed them, but let them die. The animals often do not even have water for drinking because the staff does not have time to give it to them!
HOP opened new offices on October 31, 2015, and the animals live in even worse conditions today.