Tag: Humane Society of the United States

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Undercover Investigation: Stressed, Cruelly-Treated Animals Trapped in Mall “Petting Zoos” Including Woodridge, NJ

SeaQuest is the source of hundreds of animal abuse complaints

Keeping wild animals in small, bare cages inside a retail shopping mall is absurd and abhorrently cruel. Yet this is the business model of SeaQuest, a for-profit chain of shopping mall-based wild animal petting zoos that has been plagued with controversies and cited by the U.S. Department of Agriculture more than 110 times for violations of the Animal Welfare Act.  

SeaQuest peddles public interactions with wild animals such as sloths, sugar gliders, capybaras, coatimundis, kinkajous, wallabies and Bengal cats, as well as various fish, reptiles and birds. Customers grab, handle, pet and poke at these animals intermittently all day long. The animals have no access to sunlight or fresh air, no means to escape the loud, chaotic environment created by scores of adults and children coming in and out of SeaQuest facilities throughout the day, and no space or natural habitat in which to express their natural behaviors.  

Such an environment—at SeaQuest and other facilities like it—doesn’t teach people to respect and admire animals. It teaches them that wild animals are playthings to be toyed with for amusement. The Humane Society of the United States sent an undercover investigator to two SeaQuest locations to shine a spotlight on this cruelty and strengthen our broader push for an end to it. 

There is a an abusive #SeaQuest “zoo” in #Woodridge, New Jersey in addition to other locales . 

Local animal activists are fighting to have this abomination CLOSED. We wish them luck!

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Puppy Mills Fuel Retail Pet Stores in New Jersey: Just a Fact

PUPPY MILLS: Cruelty and Suffering

The main problem we have in New Jersey is the 22 remaining retail pet stores that fuel the puppy mill >> pet store pipeline.

Even during a pandemic, when many businesses have been ordered to close, and animal organizations around the country have halted charitable life-saving transports of animals out of respect for public health, NJ’s puppy milling pet stores continue to sell puppy mill dogs. A HSUS-led coalition request to Gov. Murphy to change this via executive order was unfortunately denied by his office a couple weeks ago.

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Old Bridge, New Jersey Does NOT Need an Inhumane Petland!

On Monday evening January 13, 2020, the Township Council of Old Bridge, NJ heard a presentation from two gentlemen who are opening a Petland pet store in the township. Their presentation, complete with story boards and photos, extolled the “wonderful, humane and sanitary” conditions under which the breeders from which they’d source animals operate. They cited the approval of these “fine” breeders by the USDA and verified by inspections. Their descriptions of these breeders sounded as though the animals were living in the Ritz Carlton.

Well, they’re not.

And moments later, a virtual parade of public speakers testified that these breeders are in fact, inhumane prisons where animals are treated with unbelievable and painful cruelty, used as virtual machines to pump out puppies that are then sold to the unsuspecting public for hundreds or thousands of dollars.

To their credit, many of the opposing speakers said they assumed positive intent on the art of the proprietors, and that they not only did not oppose the opening of the store, but supported it. What they opposed was allowing the store to sell puppies that would almost certainly come from these cruel and inhumane breeders.  Several said that they felt that the proprietors have been duped. We must agree.  And this must not be allowed to go forward.

If you want to learn more about these cruel, greedy and inhumane breeders, take a gander here.

More contact information to express your opposition will soon be posted.