04/09/2025
Hard truths here, brings it all back to
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People often buy tortoises as pets without having done adequate research and this leads to a great many problems. Not only animals being kept in totally unsuitable and inhumane conditions (the classic enclosed vivarium is by far the worst offender in this category), being fed unsuitable diets that lead to serious health problems such as MBD, or metabolic bone disease, but also, very often to a realisation that they find the tortoise "not interesting enough", "too much work" or "I didn't know my dog would attack it" among countless other reasons for deciding to find it a new home. That turns out to be not as easy as they think, either. There is a reason for that. We have been around long enough to remember when things were different. In 1984 a ban was implemented on wild Mediterranean tortoise imports and practically overnight, they disappeared from shops.. as usual, the reptile trade did try to substitute other species, there was an influx of American box turtles, for example, but these were very demanding to keep and were not the "tortoise in the garden" that the public really wanted. At that time, we saw a great many sick and dying box turtles as frankly, most people had no clue as to how to keep them properly and dealers (as usual) sold them with dismally inadequate advice. Another effect that was because the supply of 'new' tortoises had effectively dried up, it became very easy to find homes for tortoises that needed one. That remained the case for several years, but then the reptile trade adapted, and suddenly the pet shops were offering 'captive bred' Hermann's tortoises (Testudo hermanni) and Russian tortoises (Testudo horsfieldii) by the thousands again. This has continued. To give a brief idea of the numbers, in just one 4-year period 14,000 juvenile Hermann's tortoises and a staggering 46,000 Russian tortoises were imported into the UK. All of these were claimed to be 'captive bred'. That of course is completely untrue, as many were and are very clearly not genuinely captive bred but either 'ranched' or wild-caught. It appears to be incredibly easy for exporters and traders to get away with frauds like this. If we break that down, this means over 11,000 good homes for Russian tortoises would be needed in the UK alone EVERY YEAR. We'd be amazed if, in reality, you could achieve 100 genuinely suitable homes. What happens to the rest? The reptile trade certainly doesn't care. They made their profit, now over to other people to try to clear up the mess! Now we get to the main point. With that many tortoises flooding in HUGE NUMBERS of them find themselves unwanted and the person who purchased them typically thinks it is going to be incredibly easy to find a genuinely suitable new home. It isn't. It is getting harder all the time, and still the imports continue, making a bad situation even worse. In addition to the direct welfare problems caused by poor care, we now have a major welfare problem with unwanted tortoises that urgently need to be rehoused, but with nowhere near the number required of suitable homes available. For these reasons we now support a total ban on all bulk commercial trade in these species. We also urge people not to buy tortoises but instead to consider rehoming ones in need. The situation is somewhat similar to puppy farms producing 'new' dogs while dogs in shelters are being killed for lack of homes. We have not reached the point yet where unwanted tortoises are being euthanised, but if large scale imports continue, that scenario becomes a real possibility. People with an unwanted tortoise can sometimes be desperate, and in some cases are in really difficult situations, losing their homes, a relationship break-up, losing their job or ill health. Given the very limited number of genuinely suitable homes available, what is happening to these tortoises? We know for a fact that many end up in very unsuitable homes, magnifying the welfare situation even more. Governments really should act on this, but they really don't seem to care at all, have 'more important' things to do, and are heavily lobbied by the reptile trade. It is a familiar situation. Humans profit - animals suffer.
