Heating from underneath

[Madkins007]

That is one of the dangers of belly heat- many reptiles will press against a hot surface that causes significant, even life-threatening burns. I would not trust the animal to move in time.

 

[Yvonne G]

because i just honestly can't help but believe that an animal has enough common sense and instincts to... run from a fire, or move away from the heat, or eat when it's hungry or drink when it's thirsty... else i seriously doubt that species would still be around today haha!

But the trouble is, a very small tortoise, sitting on a heat pad, knows that is his whole life. He doesn't have the common sense or thought process to reason out the fact that if he moves a little to the left or right he will be able to move away from the heat. All he knows is he's sitting on something hot. His whole world's floor is hot.

I've even see very large sulcatas with burns on their carapace because the light was too close to the top of the shell. They don't understand that by moving to a different spot they can avoid the heat. They just know that there is heat. A tortoise's instinct isn't fight or flight. A tortoise's instinct is pull into your shell and play dead.

I'm pretty sure it was mentioned before. When a tortoise comes out to sit on a hot rock in the real world to warm up, once he covers the rock and makes shade on it, it starts to cool. An electric hot rock does not.

 

[Floof]

That is one of the dangers of belly heat- many reptiles will press against a hot surface that causes significant, even life-threatening burns. I would not trust the animal to move in time.

Exactly.

I completely understand your reasoning, Rebekah, but the problem is, what if you're wrong? You can't predict 100% what your tortoise is going to do. It's the same reasoning behind the average keeper not planting toxic plants in their tortoises' reach, or pulling up toxic plants when they appear. Sure, they usually do know to avoid the toxic and generally bad-for-them stuff, but you can't be sure they always will. So, why take the risk?

From what I have seen of uneducated reptile keepers' enclosures, where the most burns happen, the problem is often that the overheating hot rock or the unregulated heating pad is the only heat source. So, the snake/lizard/turtle/tortoise must choose between no heat at all, or way too much heat.

Unfortunately, they often choose the latter. Both my female Russian tortoise and a ball python I once cared for were put in this situation before coming to me, and, despite being given enough room to move off their unregulated heating pads should they have wished, they both chose the heat. The ball python had the burn scars to prove it. Zoom's saving grace was that the heat pad was failing cold, to an extent, and seemed to be reaching only into the upper 90s/low 100s as opposed to the 140+ it had the potential to reach.