Dave's Dragons

Closing Statement

I opened Dave's Dragons in November of 2008 as a fulfillment of a life-long obsession with reptiles. This also happened to be during the start of the worst economic recession in decades. Nevertheless we were able to successfully grow this business over 300 percent in the first 3 years. We had a very loyal and satisfied customer base and continued to draw in new people from all over New England including Maine, Vermont and Massachusetts. Around 2016 an inspector from the New Hampshire Department of Agriculture began writing us up for extremely petty reasons including worn out flooring and dust and cobwebs in the corners of the ceiling. She continued this campaign of harrassment for the next 3 years, even though they had NEVER received a single complaint about our store from anyone ever. Meanwhile other pet stores, some who had terrible records of public complaints, were allowed to continue business without the kind of harrassment I was subjected to. Interestingly we were the only minority owned pet store under that department's jurisdiction. My son started an online petition to stop the state from pulling my license on change.org which gained over 700 signatures in just a little over a week. Unfortunately, the state would not relinquish and finally took away my license to sell animals in 2019 effectively putting me out of business permanently. I'm keeping this page active as a memorial to the store and a testament to a racist department of the state of NH.