This Portland store helps rescue lab rats and gives used pet supplies a second life

Secondhand Pet Supply is all about second chances: For a struggling mall. For used pet supplies. And for former lab rats ready for a new life.

From its location in the Lloyd Center, the Portland nonprofit sells cleaned, used pet items and offers retired research animals for adoption.

“I’m trying to change the way secondhand is seen,” founder Michael Santiesteban said. “So, being here in a mall that is kind of being reused, in a sense, just fits the whole theme.”

Santiesteban started Secondhand Pet Supply in 2022 by selling refurbished pet items on Facebook Marketplace. After vending at a series of successful pop-up markets, he incorporated as a nonprofit organization and started looking for affordable retail space.

His goal is to help people care for their pets while reducing waste.

Secondhand Pet Supply’s retail space opened about a year ago, taking over a spot that was once a Lids hat store. The shop is filled with dog clothes, leashes, bowls and toys that have been donated, professionally cleaned, and listed at half the standard retail price.

The store’s unofficial ambassador is Pumpkin, a rehomed Sulcata tortoise who has an enclosure near the front window.

The nonprofit has 35 donation bins across greater Portland placed in apartment complexes, at Mama & Hapa’s Zero Waste stores, and at Spin Laundry Lounge locations. Recycler Ridwell also has special pickup days to accept gently used items from its clients on behalf of Secondhand Pet Supply. (The next pickup is Sept. 29.)

“I want to make it as convenient as possible,” Santiesteban said, “because the biggest problem I ran into was people would just do the easy thing, which is throwing stuff away.”

Donations are accepted in any condition, with the exception of expired medication or food that is one year or more past its expiration. Even torn dog toys can be cleaned, shredded and used to make new toys.

Toys, leashes and clothes are all washed at Spin Laundry Lounge, but items such as cat trees need to be thoroughly cleaned by hand before being sold. Santiesteban has rented a second space in the mall — the former Journeys shoe store — as a workshop, cleaning area and storage space.

Here, volunteers also assemble dog toys from repurposed materials. They’re making plush squeaky bones out of old service uniforms from the Oregon Convention Center and turning canvas bags from Ridwell into dog beds.

“What we focus on is reuse, upcycling and recycling,” Santiesteban said. “So, not only do we sell secondhand products, but we also make new products from things that were broken.”

At any given a time, a handful of mice and rats are also available for adoption at the store via the Washington Adoption Center for Retired Research Animals.

The center’s founder, Holly Nguyen, is a scientist at the University of Washington working on prostate cancer research.

“I have been in research for over 20 years, and through the years, we’d hear stories about research animals who could have been adopted, but either there wasn’t anyone who could adopt them or institutions don’t have adoption policies to get them adopted out,” Nguyen said. “It got to me, and I was like, we need to start to do something about this.”

In 2023, she formed her nonprofit, with the goal of finding forever homes for retired research animals with the motto: “from the lab to the lap.”

Each “retired” animal is given a veterinarian exam and clean bill of health before being offered for adoption.

“Any eligible research animal hasn’t been invasively tested on. They are normally retired breeders, or they’re foster moms, they’re training animals,” she said. “The thing is, these healthy, normal animals would have been euthanized if not for this nonprofit.”

Animal testing is a polarizing topic, and Nguyen isn’t interested in debating the ethics around it. It took time, she said, for Seattle-area labs to trust that she would keep the animals safe and not “misrepresent” where they came from.

Her first partnership was with the VA Puget Sound Health Care System.

“Slowly, I would get an institution that agreed to partner with me,” she said. “The more stories that I shared on social media, the more institutions saw that this was a good thing, it is successful, and I’m not bashing the science behind using animals.”

To date, Nguyen has partnered with six institutions and helped 199 former research animals get adopted in Oregon, Washington and Idaho.

The majority of research animals are mice and rats, which constitute approximately 95% of all laboratory animals, according to the National Association for Biomedical Research. But she’s also placed hamsters, guinea pigs and ferrets.

“I’m also in a conversation with a university in the Midwest that does zebrafish research,” Nguyen said. “So, I’m open to amphibians, avians, really anything that I’m able to care for properly.”

Nguyen drives the animals to Portland and Vancouver, where she has a handful of foster caregivers, including Santiesteban.

“ We got him two rats pretty straight away, that got adopted very quickly,” she said. “He has fostered over 20 animals for this nonprofit, and I’m planning on bringing more rats out in a couple weeks.”

Shoppers can visit the Lloyd Center and come home with their own adopted mouse for just $10 or take home a “mall rat” for $20 at Secondhand Pet Supply.

IF YOU GO: Secondhand Pet Supply is open 11 a.m.-6:30 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and 11 a.m.-6 p.m Sunday on the first floor of the Lloyd Center, next to the skating rink. Learn more at secondhandpetsupply.com.