Richard Clark Brought Feathered Friends and Reptiles to Mt. Pleasant Ect. Mall

From The East Texas Journal, June 1995

MT. PLEASANT, TEXAS – If your elementary schooler’s been loose downtown for any length of time in the last six months, Richard Clark’s the reason he/she has come home wanting some sort of bird, snake or rat.

Pardon.

Make that canary, boa constrictor or hamster, the little darlings.

“There’s getting to be money in these birds, especially,” said Richard, “now that they won’t let you bring anything new into the country. Everything has to be bred stateside.”

What happened was this.

Richard left here an old country boy 20 years ago. He went to California, got a job with a municipal water department. He went to night school some. But he took with him his love of animals.

Richard always was different. He was the only kid in high school who spent time training chickens. Or goats. Or dogs. Or any other animal.

“You just talk to ’em,” Richard said. Ask Richard, he’ll tell about his house broken python. The one that sleeps on his pillow.

Richard always was different, like I said.

Six months back Richard, wife Gina, and their three boys opened Feathered Friends and Reptiles in Etc. Mall.

If you watched his traffic in those first months, you might not have bet on his business to make it.

But he hasn’t been overly worried with traffic.

“Now the money’s in breeding,”

Richard said. “They’ve made it illegal to bring any more birds into the country from South America.”

His pet shop then is a breeding ground for lovebirds, parakeets and Macaws.

While he was posing for the picture shown here, his bird squawked. Squawked loud.

Richard squawked back. Loud. “Don’t you holler at me,” he said, and the odd thing about it, you could tell he really intended for the bird to understand what he said.

He learned the pet shop business naturally while he was in California.

“I went from training dogs to running pet shops,” he said. “We put five of them out of business and sold out to the ones we didn’t put out.”

This time, he’s going for a wholesale market and says if you shop and compare his prices, you’ll believe that.