Just weeks before Easter, Petco began selling chicks at five suburban locations, including one on Long Island, contributing to the epidemic of fowl abandonment when cute, fuzzy Easter props are dumped to local parks when they’re too big for their Easter baskets!  

What’s even worse is that Petco is sourcing the baby birds from Murray McMurray Hatchery, a factory farm that gasses thousands of male chicks annually simply because they can’t lay eggs and ships millions of day-old chicks without food and water via USPS every year!  

Countless 1-Star Google reviews about baby birds arriving dead as well as our own experience with frantic calls from postal workers about dead and dying baby birds show that Murray McMurray’s standards for animal care are as deplorable as other Petco supplier mills where animals have been found frozen alive, crudely gassed, and neglected.

The price of eggs is soaring as an avian influenza pandemic is looming, having killed 170,000,000 chickens, ducks, and other species of poultry, but factory farms like Murray McMurray are part of the problem, not the solution. Keeping thousands of birds in filthy, overcrowded conditions breeds disease and Murray McMurray is not an exception, having tested for highly pathogenic avian influenza in 2022. Why would we want Petco potentially brokering disease around the country? 

As experts warn that an avian influenza pandemic with a mortality rate 100x that of COVID is looming, Petco is simply trying to cash in while they’re customers lose out.  

As noted in The New York Post, “Properly caring for the birds is expensive. An expert bird vet could run owners up to $1,000 or more for one visit, and the installation and maintenance of a proper coop could add thousands more to a bird lover’s budget.” Since chicks won’t lay their first egg until they’re six months old, many prospective suburban flock owners will surrender their birds to overburdened rescues like ours or be turned in by their neighbor for an illegal rooster long before they ever see any return on their investment.  

Petco knows that Easter animals are often abandoned after the holiday as it recommitted to an "adoption only" policy regarding rabbits just last year, so why would it begin selling chicks? 

Join us in telling Petco to stop selling chicks all year round!