When did the first pet shops open?

March 23, 2015 12:53 PM

I know dog/cat breeders were a service/profession going a long ways back but when did pets as a retail commodity become a thing? From some internet searching I know some of the big chains got their start in the mid-60's and that there were smaller, local "pet stores" even earlier but how early?
posted by Captain_Science to Pets & Animals (11 answers total)

This is hardly an authoritative answer, but this article claims that Chicago's oldest pet shop was founded in 1956. I was a child in Dallas in the 50's, and certainly we had pet shops then. The song "How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?" was written in 1952. All of this suggests that pet shops were around in the early 50's. I can't find anything earlier.
posted by ubiquity at 1:01 PM on March 23, 2015 [1 favorite]

This Pet Shop in Dublin, Ireland claims to have open in 1845.
posted by Flood at 1:06 PM on March 23, 2015

My grandparents started selling pet supplies in the late 40's.
It was an extension from their wholesale business in seeds and seedling potatoes. My grandmother started a retail store setting the seeds for home gardens.
This led into importing seeds and mixing them for pet birds. Witch evolved into other pet products.
posted by Mac-Expert at 1:15 PM on March 23, 2015

I would have thought that merchants specializing in songbirds, at least, would've existed fairly far back in time. I'm not having much luck with search terms but for example Mozart had a starling he recorded the purchase of in 1784. It seems like the kind of thing that may have been happening all the way back in Ancient China and Ancient Rome and earlier.
posted by XMLicious at 1:27 PM on March 23, 2015

From Medieval Pets, by Kathleen Walker-Meikle, Chapter 2, "Getting (and losing) a Pet": "Specialist pet sellers might be found in large urban areas. In Paris from the twelfth or thirteenth century a 'guild' of bird sellers was located in front of the portal of Saint-Genevieve la Petite." (via Google Books).
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 1:41 PM on March 23, 2015 [5 favorites]

this site dates the term 'pet-shop' to 1928 without giving a source, though the ngram viewer shows some hits earlier, including this 1835 book, Our Dumb Animals.
posted by jepler at 5:01 PM on March 23, 2015

And, unrelatedly, in 1834 the ladies were already putting dogs in purses.
posted by jepler at 5:14 PM on March 23, 2015

The earliest movie with 'pet store' in its plot summary on IMDB is 1930, so at least by then, pet stores were familiar enough to be part of a movie plot.
posted by LobsterMitten at 5:17 PM on March 23, 2015

Here's an academic who studies this! From an interview about her 2006 book Pets in America: A History, Katherine C. Grier says this [emphasis mine]:

Q: When did modern pet shops appear? How do they differ from modern purveyors of pet supplies?

A: In the 1700s and early 1800s, the trade in pet animals was informal. Americans usually could buy caged birds and small animals in city markets, but many probably received them from neighbors. By the 1840s, "bird stores" that sold both American songbirds and canaries imported from Europe began to appear in large cities. By the 1890s, pet stores that offered a wide range of supplies as well as many kinds of small animals were common.

Modern pet stores differ from these early shops in degree, but the basic array of products sold for pets today is remarkably similar to the inventory found in pet shops in the early 1900s. Some of the animals commonly offered for sale are relatively new: tropical fish were first offered for sale in neighborhood pet stores in the 1920s. Hamsters appeared for sale in the 1950s.

posted by LobsterMitten at 10:38 PM on March 23, 2015 [2 favorites]

A chapter synopsis from Grier's book (the whole long summary is worth a look, it's got a number of interesting bits), specifically about pet stores and treating pets as a commodity:

Pet keeping in America is also characterized by its commercial nature. In Chapters 5 and 6, I explore this by examining the trade in live animals and the development of the modern pet store and its supplies and equipment. Between 1840 and 1930, all the elements of a modern "pet industry"—a term that reflects perfectly the tension between sentiment and commodification that still resonates throughout the business—gradually developed. By the 1840s, bird stores dotted larger American cities, gradually supplanting the informal trade in native songbirds that occurred in city markets. By the 1890s, the modern pet shop had come along, supplying both animals and an expanded array of specialized supplies and equipment to facilitate care and display. By the 1920s, pet supplies and sometimes the animals themselves were offered for sale in department stores and five-and-tens.

Like any retail business, pet shops had to have reliable access to fresh inventory. Local trade in small animals sometimes capitalized on the owner's skill at breeding his or her own stock, and small, hobbyist breeders sometimes sold animals to stores. But shopkeepers also traded with a new group of middlemen who bought and sold animals. The wholesale trade in cage birds, especially German-bred canaries, was already highly organized, if small, by the mid-nineteenth century. By the early twentieth century, canaries, budgerigars (parakeets), and other exotic birds were farm-raised in the warm weather of California and Florida. These operations, along with the goldfish farms dotting Long Island, Indiana, and Maryland by the turn of the century and the southern tropical fish breeders in place by the 1920s, were a unique branch of commercial livestock raising. The wholesale animal business was subject not only to the natural vagaries of husbandry—disease, feeding problems, failure to breed, and so on—but also to fads, as interest in particular kinds of animals waxed and waned. An increasingly controversial part of the trade is found in the rise of the "puppy mill," as demand for unregistered purebred puppies has led to operations that breed and rear dogs as livestock. Some of these are run by true large-scale breeders who meet Department of Agriculture standards of care; other are operated by the infamous "backyard breeders" whose dogs suffer from poor care. In both cases, many Americans are ambivalent about puppies produced this way, because dogs are not supposed to be "livestock."

posted by LobsterMitten at 11:18 PM on March 23, 2015 [1 favorite]

Another essay by the same author, "Buying Your Friends: The Pet Business and American Consumer Culture," is in a volume called Commodifying Everything: Relationships of the Market ed. by Susan Strasser. I found the full text of it in Google Books by searching 'nineteenth century pet shop".

In this, she calls the bird stores of the 1840s the "first true pet stores." She names Charles and Henry Reiche as owners of one of the earliest bird stores in the US. They were from Germany and sold birds in New York starting about 1843, and she's found a good paper trail of their retail and bird-import/export business, including ads and business records. Many more details in the essay, and explicit reflection on the animals-as-commodities issue.
posted by LobsterMitten at 12:18 AM on March 24, 2015