Take Action: Bunnies Tortured and Killed at Petland

Last week, a disturbing image of a Petland employee from Akron, Ohio surfaced on the web and shocked animal lovers all across the country. Elizabeth Carlisle posted the photo of herself holding two dead, tortured rabbits on her own Facebook profile.

A picture of the incident can be found here. (Warning: it’s very graphic.)

Carlisle bragged that she had drowned the rabbits in the back room of the store and her manager took the photo for her. “[T]he manager took the pic for me. [S]he reminded me that there were people outside as [I] was swearing at them to just hurry up and die but then she was so kind as to take this picture.” Carlisle was on the clock at the time.

According to other posts made by Carlisle, these rabbits had been tortured prior to their deaths. They were covered in wounds, allowed to “attack and eat each other,” and one even had an eye missing and a broken jaw. These facts prove that the rabbits did not receive adequate care from any of the workers at this Petland store.

Thankfully, the store was just permanently shut down because of the incident. Carlisle has been charged with cruelty to animals and has a court date for later in August.

However, more needs to be done to prevent such blatant animal cruelty. As long as employees are not monitored—and even managers cannot be trusted to enforce standards of animal care—animals at Petland will not be safe. Other employees have since come out and told similar stories of seeing such abuse; in one case, an employee was even let go for refusing to carry out cruel procedures.

To ask Petland to stop selling rabbits altogether, click here.

Petland is also famous for supporting puppy mills, an additional concern with the company that many people oppose. According to the Human Society of the United States, Petland stores have been receiving thousands of puppies from such inhumane conditions and selling them every year.

"Petland is perpetuating the abusive puppy mill industry, where dogs are treated not like pets, but like a cash crop. They know that consumers won't stand for the cruelty inherent in mass-breeding facilities, so they make outrageous claims to hide the reality that the dogs came from puppy mills,” says Stephanie Shain, director of The HSUS Stop Puppy Mills Campaign.

To ask Petland to stop supporting these cruel puppy mills, click here.