I really want to get a baby tortoise, but I just can't figure out the housing situation. Although I live in a warmer climate, Texas, to my understanding none of the smaller tortoise species would be able to handle the winter weather when it gets in the 50s at night and a couple of times during the season maybe the 30s, so seems like an outdoor pen isn't viable. I'm not going to the trouble to run electricity out there. I was pretty much all set to build an indoor pen and give him/her lots of time in the backyard during the day, but then it dawned on me that cleaning the pen seems impractical because there's going to be lots of dirt, or whatever your substrate, and plants, etc that it would be too much to totally remove all of that and toss it out and start clean all over again. And if you don't do that, eventually it's going to start smelling.
Soooo, any advice on how I can keep a tortoise given those constraints?
Soooo, any advice on how I can keep a tortoise given those constraints?