Any Common Snapping Turtle keepers here?

[Berkeley]

The safest way to handle the big snappers is to hold them by the tail and lift the back end up and slide your hand under the plastron. Lift them up using the hand on the plastron (this lets the weight of the animal sit on your hand and not end up pulling on the turtle's tail), and the hand holding the tail is basically for stabilization. With this method, there is no pressure or torquing on the tail, the claws of the hind feet cannot reach you, and both of your hands are nowhere near the mouth.

Ones in the 6-8 inch range are generally not heavy enough to do damage to the tail if that is how they are held. However, I prefer to just grab the whole back end of the shell like they are an angry hamburger.....

I, too, have seen many a snapper 'rescue' get botched by people who underestimated their abilities.
--Berkeley

 

[saginawhxc]

Angry hamburger. That made my night.

 

[BloodbucketXXL]

I have never kept any aquatic turtle, so it will be new territory for me.

Growing up I did a lot of fishing and we would occasionally catch them. That is probably where the fascination started. There don't seem to be a ton of care sheets out there for them, and none as detailed as I would like. Like most on this forum I believe strongly in good husbandry so I just want to make sure I do things right. My plans tentatively include a summer pond fully fenced off to keep the dogs out, and a huge indoor tank for the rest of the year. I think I have most of the basics down such as diet, housing, etc... But the one thing that seems to be across the board is handling and feeding. One thing says never handle unless you need to, one says feed them in a separate container, one says a hand raised hatchling will grow up tame, and others say they are always dangerous.

One care sheet was bad enough it actually advocated holding a snapper by the tail.

Here's the thing. I'm not scared of them, but I do respect them. Obviously very interested in the species or I wouldn't be talking about this. I'm not looking for a "companion pet". I just really want to do what is best for the turtle to give it a situation it can thrive in. Of course if I can do that in a way that keeps all my fingers intact that would be good too.

Just gonna point out that I'm new to turtles. I have one common snapper, and he's coming up on 2 years old in mid-September. No other snapping turtles for me, and no other ANY turtles for me. So take what I say with a grain of salt.

For me, I handle my turtle about once a week. I got it as a hatchling and I've been with it its whole life, so that probably affects its temperament towards me. But I have zero interest in getting my common snapper "tame". I just don't see the point. It's a wild animal, it's a wild animal that I would be foolish to ever trust with my safety, and I've noticed that people with "tame" snappers often get careless and complacent. And THAT is when things can go bad: when you say, "oh, my snapper is tame, it wouldn't hurt me." Then it gets annoyed and you're sitting in the emergency room.

So yeah, I just don't see the point in trying to "tame" a snapping turtle. However, owning a pet does require sometimes having to move it for various reasons. And when you do have to move it, it would be nice if it isn't totally flipping out.

So I handle my turtle about once a week. Once a week, I take it out, give it a visual inspection to make sure that it looks healthy (shell looks good, not getting too fat, no cuts or bruises). Combined with a daily visual presence (I check up on my turtle every day, even if I don't handle it), that seems to be enough to make my turtle "pretty easy to work with". It's certainly not "tame" by any means. And he does get antsy when I handle him, and occasionally he will snap at me. But that's good enough for me. He's calm enough to be relatively safe to handle for short periods of time, which is really as calm as I need him to be. Beyond that, handling him enough to make him "tame" requires drastically increasing my contact with him, and the more contact I have with him the more likely I am to inevitably annoy him enough to receive a serious bite.

So...I do regular handling for short periods of time, but for the most part I give him his space. If he doesn't like being picked up, then I'll mostly keep my hands off him. But I'm the one running things, and a weekly checkup is non-negotiable. So I'm picking him up once a week whether he likes it or not. And if he starts throwing a tantrum, I don't put him back in the water until he calms the heck down.

That's worked out pretty well for me so far, and I have a pretty good working relationship with my turtle, one in which we (mostly) respect each other's boundaries. But again...I've only had two years experience with a single turtle. My turtle is also still small (only 9" SCL and about 6 lbs) and things may very well change once my turtle gets up into the 30 lb range.

As far as feeding in a separate container...you can, but I don't really see the benefit of doing that unless the main enclosure is either too small or doesn't have adequate filtration (or if you're feeding way too much and leaving too much uneaten food in the tank). As I understand it, the main reason for doing that is to keep the water from fouling too quickly. But if the tank is large enough and you have adequate filtration, and you're not feeding the turtle so much that there's a lot of leftover uneaten food in the water, I personally don't see the point.

 

[saginawhxc]

I don't necessarily want one that is or isn't tame. I just want one and want to do what is best for the one I get. I have seen videos with people that have tame snappers and they are petting its head and waving their fingers in its face and telling us they would never strike at them. I call shenanigans on this. They are not a domesticated animal and I think that at some level they will always carry animal instincts. It's only a matter of time till you move just a little quick one day and trigger some kind of reflexive instinct. Heck, even cats and dogs do this. How many people have you heard talk about their dog after an attack? Every single person claims they never thought their dog would do that.

Call me a stick in the mud, but I believe in treating something like a snapping turtle as a wild animal at all times. Even if the turtle learns to not feel threatened by you, you should always treat it like it could strike at you at any time.

I think your ideas on "tame" snappers and mine line up pretty well. Thank you for the response and info.

 

[saginawhxc]

Since this thread popped up again, I will mention I went shopping at the tractor supply store the other day. I almost bought the 8' long stock tank, but wasn't sure I wanted to drop 300 dollars on an enclosure just yet. Depending on the space I end up with in the new house I tentatively have plans to custom build a big tank for him, and the stock tank would be just moved to storage.

 

[cdmay]

I just found this thread this morning and I can relate to much of what has been projected and discussed.
I too began a fascination with 'monster turtles' as a young kid. In my case in south Florida. Juvenile snapping turtles (and mud and musk turtles) with their aggressive demeanor and hearty appetites made for very interesting aquarium keeping back then. Eventually I would become acquainted with the larger tropical mud turtles and even the snapper-like Staurotypus turtles. These are still my favorites that I maintain today.
Over the years we've had (my wife is totally cool with my turtles) numerous small common snappers and have head-started a number of alligator snappers as well. The only problem is that for me snappers simply become too large to maintain in my indoor aquaria and I don't have the desire to set up a pond outdoors. Yet, anyway.
I would recommend this: start with a hatchling or the smallest specimen you can obtain. Raising them from this size and watching them transform into an adult is highly rewarding and interesting. Also, instead of rushing out and purchasing a large and expensive stock tank right away, start with a smaller aquarium that fits the size of the turtle you get. Upgrade as it grows but then try to give it plenty of room with each step up. For me, nothing is worse than seeing an adult, or semi adult snapping turtles crammed into something that is obviously too small and cramped.
The dream would be to have one of those big indoor aquariums like they have at the Outdoor Sports World centers. That would be awesome!

 

[saginawhxc]

I won't own something without giving it decent space.

My dream set up would be at the end of my billiards room. Considering I plan on putting a 9' table inside the room that puts me in a room about 15' wide at a minimum. Now I'm not saying I'm building a 15' long aquarium for this thing, but it will probably get a huge chunk of that space. I envision some sort of set up that will be a minimum of ten feet long.

The stock tank would probably get future use after I moved my turtle to my actual set up. Between tortoises, turtles, and other critters it would be nice to occasionally have a temporary enclosure I could drop animals into.

At least once every week or two I find myself looking at hatchlings online and aquariums on Craigslist. My girlfriend is no longer resisting on the issue of getting one, but it has been made clear that it is my turtle and that it needs to stay in my space (billiards room). Since all I have for personal space right now though is a garage, I find myself waiting.

I had to look up Outdoor Sports World. If it is what I'm thinking we just call it Bass Pro Shop here. We have one 75 minutes south of me near Detroit, and now I'm wondering about the signage on the side of the building. They have a nice big aquarium in there that is pretty awesome. They also have a stream stocked with rainbow trout running right through the middle of the store. Cool stuff. In the same mall there is a Sea Life Aquarium that has 120,000 gallon aquarium in it that just blows my mind. We also have a Cabelas about twenty minutes north of Toledo that is similar to Bass Pro and also has a massive aquarium featuring Michigan native fish.

 

[cdmay]

Um, another dream of mine would be to have a billiards room!
Outdoor Sports World and Bass Pro Shops are essentially the same things except Bass Pro Shops are even more massive.

Drive you girlfriend nuts--start checking out the sites Monsterfishkeepers.com and WaterWolves.com. There you will see some truly awesome aquariums.

 

[saginawhxc]

House shopping is going very slowly because I refuse to buy a house that doesn't have a suitable space for a pool table. I have a ratty old 8' in the garage now, but I'm done with garage kept tables. Plus my garage doubles as a workshop, and every time I build something I have to throw a sheet of plywood over the table and use it as a work surface. I have to re-level the table every single time I do it. Even though it is a piece of junk table I cry a little bit every time.

The funny thing is I'm ten years removed from really spending any serious time playing.

 

[cdmay]

Not to get too far OT, but we had an 8 X 4 Brunswick table in our home when I was in high school. My first 'dates' with my (now) wife Barbie was when she would come over to play pool with me. True story. We were 15 years old.

 

[saginawhxc]

Shhh... It's not off topic. It's my thread anyways.

Besides this started because of the plan for my snapping turtle room, which will just happen to contain a pool table. I believe that is the natural habitat of the snapping turtle.

 

[tglazie]

Interesting thread. Snappers around my parts tend to vary quite a bit, behavior wise. I've never owned one as a permanent pet, but I have nursed some starving ones back when I was younger and fostering turtles and tortoises. Back in those days, Woodlawn Lake near downtown San Antonio would flood over and turtles of all sizes would smack against the basin of a concrete dam and get stuck down there. They have since improved the watershed, allowing turtles to escape the area. It's still a drag for hatchlings, though, given that when they hit the concrete, they usually get picked off by harens. Anywho, I used to find rather large snappers down there with some regularity. One I found must have been over thirty pounds. She was very difficult to move, especially when I was climbing up a steep incline. Luckily though, she was the most reserved snapper I had ever encountered. She didn't try to bite, not even once, though she was flailing her legs about in a truly comical fashion. Once I got her to a smaller pond on the other side of the park, she bolted into the water. Compare this with a male I pulled from the same spillway a mere two weeks later, and this guy was like an electric hole puncher on the fritz, snapping at the air in a most monstrous fashion. Luckily, he was only around ten pounds, so he fit in my bucket. I thought it was funny though, given that I went down into the spillway with a friend of mine who thought it would be fun. Unfortunately, you're surrounded by twenty five foot tall white concrete walls on a 98 degree day while standing in a pool of warm shallow water that smells like a combination of burning tires and dead fish, so you really have to like turtles to put up with something like that. Needless to say, when he saw the giant female snapper's tail disappear behind a concrete debris stop, he totally freaked and asked me if it was an alligator. Luckily, I've never encountered one of those in the spillway. We're too far north, I think, by just a few miles.

T.G.

 

[saginawhxc]

You make it sound so fun...

Actually I'm just screwed up enough I want to do this.

 

[tglazie]

I mean, if you like turtles, it's a blast. You're helping them get out of a jam while getting opportunity to actually handle wild turtles, up close and personal. But yeah, I haven't done this in years. I go down to Woodlawn at least three times per summer to sit and turtle watch, but they've since fixed the spillway, so turtles really don't get trapped down there anymore. One of the last times I went down there, though, was pretty bad. I ended up slipping on the concrete and got a really nasty case of road rash. It was extra painful given that I ended up going into the water anyway, because I've been known to be an idiot at times. I suffered a mild skin infection as a result of this, despite having gotten back to the house to clean the wound about an hour later. I managed to pull two big female red ears and a juvenile softshell from the spillway, though, and they were very happy to get back into the pond, so yay. But yeah, after that unpleasant episode, I stopped going down there. I guess I'm getting too old for that sort of stuff.

T.G.

 

[surfergirl]

Beautiful picture!

I caught a huge female out of a creek in Ga back when I was 13 years old and she was huge! she laid eggs every season and we would run across her babes all the time. I carried her home one time to show my Mom how big she was and it took me 45 minutes to go 500yds. lol. she would stretch her neck nearly to her tail - carried her by the back 1/4 of her shell never by her tail, just couldn't treat them that way- a neighbor put a pot handle in front of her mouth and she bit it in half. she was huge and absolutely beautiful. got her back in her territory a lot faster with a big tub. I would never do that again, stupid teenager at the time, learned to just take pictures and leave them be. she continued to add 100 or more babes to our creek system every year! I was so fascinated with their aggression and hunting techniques....such a feisty reptile. I temporary housed a few of these back in the day, very fun to watch them. I still move them out of the road often but it is never a safe or fun adventure, they have a very good natural way of keeping people at a distance.
enjoy your new adventure!

I have a skippy filter for my pond - it has worked wonderfully! cheap too! will post a picture of mine and I have a external pond filter but I have run a small 30 gal tub skippy with a 1000 gal /hr pump that kept the pond(1000gal) very clear as well. it is all about keeping the water chemistry in check. regular testing and changes until you find the right weekly maint. for water chemistry stability. just like all other captive habitats
- the bigger you can make it the better- less maintenance needed.