Woman spots Petco hamster in distress. Then a worker says they’re not allowed to add more substrate

A woman filmed a single, overactive hamster in a Petco display cage furnished with three plastic igloos, a small food bowl, and a shallow drift of wood shavings. She says the sad sight of its living conditions and clear itch to move prompted her to walk out of the store with the animal in hand.

Kali Rae (@mskalirae) filmed it and stamped the clip “F— you @Petco.”

As of this writing, her post has more than 850,000 views.

The Hamster

The clip runs 14 seconds and never leaves the glass. The hamster isn’t hard to pick out. It lives in hideouts that are red, green, and yellow. The wood shavings behind it barely clear the floor of the cage.

Kali Rae tags the post #zoochosis—the term for the repetitive, purposeless behavior captive animals develop—alongside #petco and #hamster.

The caption carries the charge. In an edit to her original post, she adds, “YES I TOOK IT HOME.” Then she issues a disclaimer: Petco staff are “not ALLOWED to add more substrate for this little guy to burrow,” which she calls a “corporates decision.” She signs off, “@Petco yall suck do better.”

Was it Abusive?

In the comment section, viewers debated whether large-scale corporations should even sell pets.

“Petco and PetSmart should not be allowed to sell animals,” one person wrote.

Another person co-signed the substrate issue. “This is definitely a sign of high induced stress. … He needs more bedding (at least 5 inches deep) and more enrichment,” they said.

“When I worked at Petco, there was a super strict rule not to put more than an inch of bedding,” one person claimed. “If you did you’d get flagged. It was terrible. … I felt so bad for the little guys and ended up leaving due to how they treated them.”

The Content Creator’s Solution

A day later, Kali Rae posted a follow-up that discusses the broader issue. “Yes, I did in fact bring that hamster home,” she says, “But … they are just going to restock that enclosure with something else.”

She’s careful about where the blame sits, believing it to be more of an institutional issue: “It’s not necessarily that any particular staff are neglecting the care of these animals. It’s that these corporations only allow them to do so much.”

Her example is the bedding ration—a hamster needs “five, six, seven inches to burrow,” she says, but staff get “a quarter of this bedding bag” to split across every hamster in stock, leaving each one “an inch or less.”

The ask is bigger than a rescue: “I want to work towards legislation requiring pet stores to meet enforceable species-specific minimum standards.”

She names PETA, the ASPCA and the MSPCA, animal-welfare researchers, and former pet-store employees as the help she’s calling in.

Deep Enough to Disappear

Wild golden hamsters dig, and the digging isn’t optional. For a 2006 paper in Applied Animal Behaviour Science, a team at the University of Bern housed hamsters in bedding from 10 to 80 centimeters deep.

At the shallow end, the animals gnawed the cage bars; at 80 centimeters, “wire-gnawing was never observed,” and every hamster built a burrow and moved in. The authors, led by A.R. Hauzenberger, give a one-line standard: “Deep bedding which is appropriate for burrowing can be recommended.” A retail tray of shavings is not deep bedding.

The bar-biting has a name. Born Free coined “zoochosis” for exactly the kind of stress behavior Kali Rae witnessed.

Subplot News reached out to Kali Rae via TikTok message, as well as Petco and PETA via email.

This article first appeared on Subplot News.