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If you need to board your pet, use a local kennel instead a chain pet store.

The above-stated conclusion was reached by The Consumerist after hearing from a reader who says he witnessed animal abuse at a PetSmart PetsHotel in Alexandria, Virginia.  Matt reported the alleged abuse to store managers, who seemed horrified right up until the point in time when the entire matter was swept under the rug and the allegedly abusive employee was allowed to keep his job.

The full article is much more descriptive, but here are the basics as told by Matt:

As we waited for our dog to be retrieved, we watched a live video stream of the day care room on a monitor facing us. The room appeared to be overcrowded with more than a dozen large dogs in a relatively small space. One employee could be seen in the middle of the crowd of dogs. Suddenly, both my wife and I saw this employee raise his hand and strike a dog. We were shocked by what we saw. Outraged, we immediately pointed this out the desk employee and requested to see a manager. As we waited, we continued to watch the video feed and witnessed the worker strike two or three more dogs. The Pet Hotel manager came out and we explained what we saw. We asked that this matter would be investigated and that the individual we saw strike the dogs would be removed from caring for dogs.

[...]

The following day we received calls from both the Pet Hotel manager as well as the store manger. The Pet Hotel manager told me personally that she watched the video and found the worker's actions "unacceptable." In a separate conversation, the store manager stated that he watched the video "about 12 times" and also found it horribly inappropriate.

[...]

Ten days after the incident, the District Manager called us back and stated that she watched the video in slow motion, and that while she could understand how we interpreted the employee's gestures to have been inappropriate, that she has concluded that the man was just playing with the animals, did not in fact strike any dogs, and was not inappropriate. In response, we very reasonably asked if we could watch the video with her so she could show us what she saw. She said no.