I work in a pet store in Australia, and I keep a lot of animals myself: bearded dragons, green tree frogs, quail, chickens, rabbits, a caique and a row of shrimp tanks. So I get the same problems from both directions, from customers at the counter and from my own mistakes at home.
This is the stuff I wish I could say properly at work, when there is a queue behind you and I have about forty seconds. None of it is complicated. Most of it will save you money.
I work in an Australian pet store, and the same mistakes come through the door every week. The big ones are keeping a betta in a jar, buying a macaw with no research, treating the cheapest dog food as the best value, medicating an itchy dog without looking at what it eats, and creating a fussy eater by feeding human food. The most dangerous misunderstanding I see is people asking for Advocate and assuming it covers paralysis ticks, which it does not. The two products I talk people out of are rawhide and bird huts. The cheapest thing that prevents the most problems is an iodine and calcium bell for seed eating birds. The one thing worth real money is a good set of dog clippers if you plan to clip at home.
If you are going to clip your dog at home, buy a proper clipper. This is the purchase where being cheap costs you the most, because a weak clipper does not cut through a real coat, it drags and pulls, and the dog learns to hate being groomed. Spend the money once.
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1. The Betta in a Jar
This one enrages me every single time.
People keep a fighting fish in a little jar. Worse, they come into the shop to buy just the jar, because they have seen a photo of one sitting on a desk next to a plant and assumed that is how it works.
A betta is a tropical fish. It needs warm water, filtered water, and water that has been cycled long enough to have bacteria in it. A jar has none of that. The water is cold, it is full of ammonia within days, and there is not enough of it for anything to stay stable. The reason the myth persists is that bettas can breathe air, so they hang on in conditions that would kill another fish quickly. Surviving is not the same as being fine.
If you want a betta, buy a small heated tank with a filter. It is not a big expense and it is a completely different animal to own. Mine lives in a 40 litre indoor pond and it is one of my favourite things in the house.
2. Buying the Animal Before Doing Any Research
The sharpest version of this is someone walking in to buy a macaw.
A macaw is not a pet in the way a dog is a pet. It is a lifelong commitment, and I mean that literally: you are quite possibly buying an animal that you will pass on to your grandchildren. They outlive their owners routinely. And people buy them with no research at all, because they are beautiful and they were there.
It applies to every animal to some degree. The rule I would give anyone is simple. Before you buy, find out three things: how long it lives, what its enclosure actually needs to be, and what it costs to run for a year. If any of those three surprise you, you are not ready to buy it today. Nothing in the shop is going anywhere.
3. Cheapest Food Is Not the Same as Best Value
People treat the cheapest dog food on the shelf as the sensible economical choice. It usually is not.
Cheap food is bulked out, which means you feed more of it per meal to get the same nutrition, so the gap per bag is not the gap per month. It also tends to be where the ingredients most likely to cause problems live, which leads directly into the next point.
I am not telling you to buy the most expensive bag either. I am telling you that price per kilo is the wrong number to shop on.
4. An Itchy Dog Is Usually a Food Problem
This is the one I would most like people to hear, because it costs owners the most money.
Someone has a dog with itchy skin. They go to the vet. They come away with medications to try, then more medications, then something else. And in all of it, nobody has looked at what the dog is eating. The majority of the time, in what I see, the diet is the cause.
The usual culprits are beef, chicken and wheat. They are also the three most common ingredients in mainstream dog food, which is exactly why this gets missed.
To be clear, I am not telling you to stop anything your vet has prescribed, and itchy skin genuinely does have other causes, including fleas, mites and environmental allergies. What I am saying is that if your dog has been itchy for months and nobody has tried a proper elimination diet, that is the question to ask at your next appointment. A food trial is cheap compared to another round of medication.
5. Fussy Eaters Are Usually Made at Home
Owners come in convinced their dog or cat is a fussy eater and looking for a food that will fix it. The food is rarely the problem.
Most of the time the animal is holding out, because it has learned that if it waits long enough, something better arrives. Usually that something better is what you are eating.
The method that works is unglamorous:
- Put their food down.
- Give them ten to twenty minutes.
- If they have not eaten it, take it away.
- Offer it again at the next meal.
- Nothing else in between. No treats, no scraps, no human food.
They get the message pretty quickly. Do not feel bad about it. You are not starving them, you are just stopping the negotiation. The part people get wrong is step five, because one piece of chicken resets the whole thing.
Two caveats worth stating plainly. Check with your vet first if your pet is very young, very old or unwell, because a sudden loss of appetite can be a symptom rather than a habit. And be more careful with cats than dogs, because cats genuinely should not go long without eating.
6. What Comes Back to the Shop Most: Fish Filters
If you asked me what gets returned most often, it is fish filters. And almost none of them are faulty.
People buy a filter, it does not seem to be doing anything, or it goes quiet, or the tank is still cloudy, so they bring it back. The usual answer is that it is set up wrong, the impeller is clogged, or they have rinsed the media under the tap and killed the bacteria living in it.
That last one is the big one. A filter is not a strainer, it is a home for bacteria. The bacteria are what actually process the waste. Rinse the sponge under chlorinated tap water and you have just sterilised the thing that was doing the work. Rinse media in a bucket of old tank water instead, and only when flow drops.
7. The Ongoing Cost Nobody Budgets For: Bird Toys
People price up the cage, the stand and the food, and then they are genuinely surprised by toys.
Bird toys are consumable. They are supposed to be destroyed, that is the entire function. For a big parrot like a macaw, a toy can be gone in an afternoon, and good ones are not cheap. If you are costing out a large bird, put toys in as a recurring monthly line item, not a one off purchase at the start.
It is not an optional extra either. A bird with nothing to destroy will find something to destroy, and that is usually its own feathers or your house.
8. The Animal People Give Up Most: Cats
Cats, and it is not close. There are so many out there, and a big part of it is people letting them breed.
An undesexed cat that goes outside will produce kittens, those kittens get homed with friends and family who were not really planning on a cat, and a proportion of those end up surrendered. It is the most preventable problem in the whole industry, and desexing is the entire fix.
9. The Brand People Ask For That Is Usually Not the Best Option
This is the one with real consequences, so I want to be careful with it.
People come in and ask for Advocate by name, because they have seen it advertised or used it for years. Advocate is a perfectly good product for what it does, which is fleas, heartworm, intestinal worms and mites. What it does not do is kill paralysis ticks.
If you live anywhere on the east coast and you think you are covered because you are using it, you are not. That is a dangerous gap, because a paralysis tick can kill a dog and the treatment runs into thousands.
For dogs, products like Simparica Trio and NexGard Spectra are monthly chewables that cover fleas, paralysis ticks, heartworm and intestinal worms in one. For cats, something like Bravecto Plus is a spot on that covers a very wide range for months at a time rather than weeks.
I am not a vet and formulations change, so check the current label and talk to your vet about what suits your animal. But please do check what your product actually covers rather than assuming. I have written more about the risk in my guide to paralysis ticks in Australia, and about the products themselves in the best flea and tick treatments for dogs.
One critical warning while we are here: permethrin based dog tick products are toxic to cats and there is no antidote. If you have both, they cannot be treated the same way.
10. The Cheapest Thing That Prevents the Most Problems
For birds, an iodine and calcium bell. They cost a few dollars and they solve a problem most owners have never heard of.
Australian soil is famously low in iodine, which means the crops grown in it are low in iodine, which means a seed mix made from those crops is low in iodine. It is the same reason we iodise salt for people. A budgie living on plain seed is therefore sitting on a genuine deficiency risk, and iodine deficiency in small birds causes thyroid problems that show up as breathing difficulty and a change in voice.
A mineral bell in the cage is a few dollars against a problem that is miserable to treat. If you keep budgies or other small seed eating birds, it is the single best value item in the shop.
11. What Experienced Keepers Buy That Beginners Never Do
Two things stand out.
For birds, a wide range of toys that get rotated. Beginners buy two or three toys and leave them in the cage forever. Experienced keepers own far more than are in the cage at any one time, and swap them around. A familiar toy is furniture. The same toy reintroduced a month later is brand new again. Rotation is free enrichment.
For rabbits, a lot more hay than a beginner thinks is reasonable. Experienced rabbit people buy hay in quantities that look absurd, because hay is the actual food and it should be in front of them all the time. I go into this in my own rabbit setup.
12. The Sentence That Tells Me You Are About to Have a Problem
Someone buys a fish and says, cheerfully: cool, let us see how long it lives.
It is said as a joke, and it tells me everything. It means the animal is an experiment rather than a pet, and that nothing has been set up in advance. A fish that is going into a cycled, heated, correctly sized tank does not prompt that sentence, because the person already knows the answer is years.
13. Two Things People Get Told That Are Just Wrong
That macaws are easy to look after. They are not. They are loud, enormously demanding, destructive by design, and they outlive their owners. Anyone telling a first time bird owner a macaw is easy is either selling one or has never lived with one.
That rabbits just get along easily. They absolutely do not. Bonding rabbits is difficult and sometimes it never works. They can seriously injure each other, and I have had rabbits at the vet because of it. Two babies raised together is the easy case, and people are told that is what it is always like.
14. Seasonal Things People Think About Too Late
- Bird heaters. People come looking in the middle of the first cold snap, which is already the point at which their bird is cold.
- Flea and tick treatment treated as seasonal. It should be year round. Fleas live indoors quite happily through winter, and in warmer parts of Australia ticks are a year round risk even though the peak is spring.
- Dog coats. Same pattern as bird heaters. By the time it is obviously cold, everyone wants one at once.
None of these are expensive. They are just things that are much easier to buy in advance than in the week everyone else needs them.
Two Things I Talk People Out Of
Rawhide. It is so bad. It is beef skin, it is not digested, and it swells and softens into lumps that can choke a dog or block its gut. It sells well because it lasts a long time and dogs love it, which is exactly the problem. There are plenty of chews on the same shelf that actually break down, and I will point you at those instead every time.
Bird huts and hides. They look lovely and birds do go in them, but an enclosed cosy space reads as a nest site, and that can switch on hormonal and territorial behaviour that you then have to live with. There is also the risk of a bird pulling threads loose and swallowing them. If your bird has suddenly got aggressive or obsessive about one corner of its cage, this is worth looking at first.
The Thing That Is Actually Worth the Money
If you are going to clip your dog yourself, buy a good clipper. Spend the money.
This is the purchase where going cheap costs you most. A weak clipper will not cut through a real coat. It drags, it pulls, it heats up, and the dog learns that grooming hurts, which is a problem you then have forever. People buy the cheap one, get a bad result, decide they are no good at grooming, and go back to paying a groomer.
A proper clipper pays for itself in about two or three salon visits, and it is the difference between home grooming being a sustainable thing you do and a thing you tried once. I have gone through which ones are actually worth it in my guide to the best dog clippers in Australia.
While I am here: buy the blade oil too. Most clippers people bring back as broken are not broken, they have a blunt or gummed up blade. Blades are consumable, clippers are not.
What I Point People Towards
The things I actually recommend at the counter, and the alternatives to the two products above. (these are affiliate links)
Frequently Asked Questions
Can a betta fish live in a jar or a bowl?
No, and it is the mistake that frustrates me most at work. People come in to buy the jar, not even the tank. A betta is a tropical fish. It needs heated, filtered, cycled water and enough volume that the water stays stable, and a jar gives it none of those. The fish surviving for a while is not the same as the fish being alright. If you want a betta, budget for a small heated tank rather than the jar, and it will be a dramatically better animal to own.
Why is my dog itchy, and could it be the food?
Very often, yes. I see a lot of owners who have been through rounds of medication for itchy skin without anyone looking hard at the diet, and in my experience the diet is behind it most of the time. The usual culprits are beef, chicken and wheat. That does not mean you should stop anything your vet has prescribed, and skin problems do have other causes. But if your dog is persistently itchy and nobody has tried an elimination diet, that is a conversation worth having at your next appointment.
How do I fix a fussy dog or cat?
Usually by changing what the owner does rather than what the pet eats. Most fussy eaters I meet have been taught to hold out, because the human food or the treats always arrive eventually. The fix is to put their food down, give them ten to twenty minutes, and take it away if they do not eat it. Offer it again at the next meal. No treats, no scraps, nothing else in between. They get the message quickly. It feels cruel for about a day and it is not, but check with your vet first if your pet is very young, very old, unwell, or a cat, since cats should not go without food for long.
Is rawhide safe for dogs?
I talk people out of it whenever I can. Rawhide is beef skin, it is not really digestible, and it swells and softens into lumps that can cause choking or a blockage. There are plenty of better chews on the shelf that actually break down. It is one of the few products I will genuinely steer someone away from at the counter.
Does Advocate protect against paralysis ticks?
No. Advocate covers fleas, heartworm, intestinal worms and mites, but it does not kill paralysis ticks. This is the gap I see most often at the counter, because people ask for it by name and assume it covers everything. If you are anywhere in paralysis tick country, which is essentially the east coast from far north Queensland down to Victoria, you need a product that specifically lists paralysis ticks. Monthly chewables like Simparica Trio and NexGard Spectra do for dogs, and Bravecto Plus is a long acting option for cats. Formulations change, so check the current label and ask your vet what suits your animal.
Why do budgies need an iodine bell?
Because Australian soil is low in iodine, so the grain grown here is low in iodine, so a plain seed diet is low in iodine too. It is the same reason our salt is iodised. Small seed eating birds, budgies especially, are prone to thyroid problems as a result, which show up as laboured breathing and a change in voice. A combined iodine and calcium bell costs a few dollars and hangs in the cage, and it is the best value item in the shop for the problem it prevents.
Are bird huts and hides bad for parrots?
I would avoid them. They look cosy and they sell well, but enclosed spaces read as a nest site to a bird, and that can trigger hormonal and territorial behaviour you then have to live with. There is also a risk of birds ingesting loose fibres. A parrot that suddenly turns aggressive or obsessive about one corner of its cage is worth checking for exactly this.