J

For people who keep tortoises as pets, McDermid said they need to provide them with a lot of natural sunlight.

 

“If they don’t get the proper amount of sunlight, they could develop metabolic bone disease which can lead to all kinds of shell deformities that can [cause] deformities in their internal organs,” McDermid said. “They can't metabolize calcium properly, either. So it affects their bone structure and everything else.”

 

Sheng Xie, a graduate student at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University who has raised tortoises since he was 4 years old, agreed with McDermid. He said tortoises easily catch various diseases if they don’t get enough sunlight.

 

“Sometimes they cannot open their eyes due to the lack of sunlight,” Xie said. “They would also get soft shells and bow-shaped carapace.”

 

Another challenge for people to raise tortoises is to figure out the feeding pattern. A lot of people feed them big bunches of grocery store produce and that's not what they should eat, according to McDermid.

 

“They're evolved to eat from the landscape that they're native to,” McDermid said. “Figuring out where the species come from and what landscape it is really has a big influence on what that particular animal is adapted to eat and can digest and utilize properly.”

 

Aileen Lee, a teacher in Austin Chinese School, said she raised a tortoise 11 years ago. She fed her tortoise many times a day and it died finally.

 

“I don’t know why it died,” Lee said. “Some people said I fed them too often and too much.”

 

Xie said this is another mistake people usually make. He said it’s hard to summarize the frequency of feeding. It relates a lot to the temperature.

 

“When it reaches 37 degrees in summer, tortoises digest food most quickly,” Xie said. “You can feed it once a day and you don’t have to worry about its digestive disorder. However, when it gets cooler, it digests food much slower. You should feed it once a week.”

 

People love tortoises for various reasons. McDermid said tortoises are her calling. McLain said she enjoys tortoises’ company in her daily life. And out of love for tortoises, Lao Wang, the owner of Julie’s Noodles, a Chinese restaurant in Austin, spends one hour a day walking with his three tortoises.

 

“I always walk with them on the grassland in my backyard,” Wang said. “Gradually they recognize me and follow me wherever I go.”

 

Xie said raising tortoises include three stages. The first stage is that people raise tortoises: People feed and walk tortoises, and this is the most basic level. The second stage is that tortoises raise themselves: People provide a desirable environment for them and they would grow, adapt to the environment and do self-regulation. The third stage is that tortoises nourish people: Humans get relaxed and better mental health condition through the interaction with their tortoises.

 

“The third stage sounds metaphysical,” Xie said. “But tortoises and humans are tightly connected.”

 

However, Xie denied tortoises’ emotional connection with humans. He said tortoises normally have low intelligence level. He also explained that tortoises recognize the sight and sound of their owners only because they develop conditional reflex for them, an acquired response that is under some certain stimulus, according to Medical Dictionary. Therefore, they just associate their owners with food.

 

McLain agreed with Xie. “They know that the sound of our voices mean they will be fed,” McLain said. “They are reptiles, with a reptile brain.”

 

Reptiles do demonstrate basic emotions, and the main two are fear and aggression, according to a report from Sharman Hoppes, the clinical assistant professor at the Texas A&M College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences.

 

"A snake that is feeling aggressive may warn you with a hiss," Hoppes said in the report. "This can occur when you are forcing your attention on the snake, and if you persist, they may strike out. Typically snakes hiss or coil when they are feeling hostile, but most pet snakes are not aggressive animals unless threatened."

 

But reptiles generally have not developed the feeling of pleasure or love, according to the report. Hoppes said tortoises appear to like some people more than others, but he doesn’t know if it is love.

 

McDermid said tortoises have many different personalities.

 

“Some of them are grumpy and don't want to be touched or messed with,” McDermid said. “Some of them are very social and as soon as you walk out, they are running up to you.”

 

McLain felt so as well. She said she has two female tortoises and one of them likes to sit in her lap. But the other one just wants to walk around and eat. “I have heard people tell me that they have a ‘mean’ tortoise, who tries to bite them if they get too close,” she said.

 

According to ScienceDaily, tortoises are generally reclusive and shy. But Yiyan Zhang, a radio-television-film senior at the University of Texas at Austin, said different tortoise species have different personalities in general, but individuals do vary.

 

“Sulcata tortoises are known to be more easy-going and can have more interaction with human than some other species like marginated tortoises,” Zhang said. “But there definitely exist shy sulcata individuals that tend to have less interaction with human.”

 

McDermid said tortoises with different personalities sometimes fight with each other. “They get under the shell of their opponent and flip them upside down,” she said. “They poke through the opponent’s skin if they go head to head and actually cause puncture wounds and bleeding in other combatants.”

 

To avoid tortoises fighting with each other, McDermid said she keeps them separated by species. She also keeps a keen eye on them to make sure that nobody is hurting anybody else.

 

“We also keep enclosures large enough so that we can remove them to another area of the enclosure and distract them [from] the same scene,” she said. “It’s the same exact thing you would do with toddler - just trying to distract it by doing something else for a while.”