National retailer PetSmart is planning to open two pet stores in Anchorage.

The Arizona company has signed a lease to open a store in Northeast Anchorage's Tikahtnu Commons mall.

On Friday, the company applied for a building permit to open a second store in the South Anchorage retail space on Dimond Boulevard once occupied by CompUSA, according to city officials.

PetSmart is the second national pet-store chain to move to Anchorage in recent years. California-based PetCo opened its first store in South Anchorage about five years ago and now has one in the Glenn Square Mall, too.

PetCo and other pet retailers said Friday they are bracing themselves for the new competition.

"In most (Lower 48) cities, we have Petcos and PetSmarts. It's not new to PetCo to have a lot of PetSmarts around," said Amanda Jeesin, an assistant manager at Petco's Glenn Square store.

She said the two stores sell different brands. Internet message boards show a fierce debate between PetCo and PetSmart customers about which company offers the best products.

Locally owned pet stores said they are an endangered species, not just because of pet-store chains but also because big-box stores are offering large pet-supply sections.

"There's been an attrition of independent pet stores. There really aren't many left," said Joel Klessens, vice president of Alaska Mill & Feed, which has been selling pet and gardening supplies for decades.

Several locally owned stores, including Rae's Harness Shop and Animal House, have closed down in recent years.

If built, the proposed PetSmart in South Anchorage will sit just hundreds of feet east of PetZoo, the Palmer-based pet-store chain founded in the 1980s.

PetSmart and PetZoo did not return calls for comment for this story.

According to its Web site, PetSmart owns more than 1,149 pet stores in North America, with more than 100 in-store "PetHotels" that provide boarding for cat and dogs. The proposed store includes a pet hotel, said Jim Jager, a spokesman for Cook Inlet Region Inc., the Anchorage company that owns Tikahtnu.

Tikahtnu's PetSmart is planned just north of the Kohl's department store. Its proposed size is about 25,000 square feet -- about half the size of the nearby Sports Authority store, Jager said.

Construction could begin this spring and the store is expected to open in about a year, he said.