Hermanns tortoise escaped

[Geordiewardy]

Hello, I have recently looked after a friends Hermanns tortoise at their house whilst they were in holiday. It is in a glass Viv with sliding doors and on a unit around 2 foot off the floor. On 2 occasions of going around to feed and clean the tortoise set up, I was shocked to see one of the sliding doors ajar and the tortoise missing, I hunted around and found him both times and returned him to his enclosure. However, the person said it's never happened before and doesn't believe me for some reason!! They said it would have injured itself by falling and could not open the door anyway! If this is the case then someone else must have let themselves in and let it out, which is bizzare and scarey. Has anybody else experienced a Hermanns tortoise do this or is my friend correct? Thank you

 

[Tom]

Most people don't keep tortoises in that sort of enclosure. They are too small for anything but a small baby.

Yes, it is possible for them to slide open doors like that. That is why I have my enclosures custom made with a 6 inch litter dam to hold in the tortoise and the substrate when I slide the doors open.

 

[The_Four_Toed_Edward]

I would even go as far as to say that once he has had success with it, he will try it again.

 

[COmtnLady]

Create a block/lock to stop the glass doors from sliding open. Since you didn't provide a picture these suggestions may not work, but -

1. If the doors slide past each other, like two trains passing on different tracks, get a stick, a dowel, some sort of bar that you can place in the channel that one of the doors slides along in to stop that door from moving. And set a second one in the channel of the outer door to block it also, but make sure you wrap a string or piece of tape around it so that you can use that as a handle to easily pick the stick/whatever out of the channel when you need to open the door.

2. tape - use a wide tape, like duct tape, or packaging tape, and put several strips horizontally across either the handle end and where it closes to, or on both the doors at the center part where the doors slide past each other, to hold the doors steady against moving. (Fold a little bit of the end of the tape back onto itself so that you can grab it to unstick it to be able to open the door.) It will be a pain to undo every time you need to open it, but the owner is correct about the tortoise getting seriously injured falling that far to the floor.

There are probably things ready-made at a hardware store that would lock the doors from moving, but tape or sticks is cheaper.

Basically you have to make it so that the doors can't move when you aren't doing the moving of them.

 

[KarenSoCal]

Get 1 of these. It's exactly what stores use to lock their display cases. It has an added advantage that if children visit, you can be sure one of them does not open the door. I got mine at Walmart, I think. They are not hard to find.