Littlefoot's Momma #2
New Member
- Joined
- May 4, 2015
- Messages
- 2
Hello everyone my name is Angela and I'm a newbie, I have a the "Tort" of a thousand names (Afghan Tortoise). His name is "Little Foot" hehe four toes. I will give you a little background about myself so you can understand our situation. I've always wanted turtles and everyone around me knows because I always talk about it. Ever since I was a little girl I love watching their heads pop up from the lake. Well last week my best friend/roommate brought an aquarium in the house and tells me she got me something. She is hiding something behind her back and brings her hand towards me and says "Look I got you a turtle, the man at the pet store said it's a Russian turtle." As sweet as her thought was I had to tell her that is a tortoise not a turtle lol. I fell in love with him immediately anyway. As we were setting everything up I'm asking her all of these questions and she handed me a printed sheet of paper. It was no more than 2 paragraphs long and said, "The man at the store said this is everything we need to know." Needless to say I was like, 'Take me to this store and let me talk to this pet store man.' First I asked him is the tort a boy or girl, he said,' "They"don't tell us that.' Oh okay well do "they" tell you how old he or she is? Again looking dumbfounded he said, "No I'm sorry "they"don't usually tell us much information at all but I would guess around 1 years old. 'Hmmm Okay well do "they" have a phone number?' and he goes on to say, "They are just our suppliers ma'am they aren't the ones that originally catch or harvest the tortoises." I told him to 'Tell "They" that I think they and him shouldn't be selling an animal that neither of them know absolutely anything about, because it's dangerous to the animals'. I walk out miffed but I know I have my trusty internet waiting for me. I am the type that believes most of the time it's not going to be done properly unless you do it yourself anyway. I did not know the terror that was awaiting me! Old, conflicting, and wrong information OH MY! I would toss a little bit of this type of green in his cage, sit down, read for a second, and be right back up trucking down the hall to take that back out of the cage because it "could be" poisonous (Ugggggggh). After I got to the end of the limited conflicting information on the Testudo Horsefieldii/Russian Tortoise from 1990, I realized that some were referring to them as Afghan's, Four toed, Steppe, and Central Asian. So I made a quick right and ended up in 1994. I went about a mile and was back to square one again. Then I got serious, lol. I started using words like Flora, Fauna, agriculture, eco regions, temperate grasslands, desert biome, etc. I had sticky pages of yellow post it notes stuck to any clear space I could find. I kid you not I even made my way somehow to the country of Afghanastan's web page and talked to someone named Shafiq in their forum chat area lol. There was a language barrier but I was able to learn a lot of information about their climate extremes from the north to the south, flora in both areas, down to the substrate. I also learned that they refer to them as an Asian turtles and found things under that name as well. I found some more information on the tortoise through The University of Michigan page and found out there are 3 subspecies of Testudo Horsfieldii- 1. Testudo Horsfieldii Kazachstanica, Testudo Horsfieldii Rustamovi, and Testudo Horsfieldii Horsefieldii. I had seen them mentioned on Wikipedia but they didn't say much about them. When I get some time I will definitely post all of the information I have gathered in here and make a new webpage because the lack of information is really ridiculous. So for anyone having trouble like I did here are a few links that may be helpful:
http://media.wix.com/ugd/840bd6_e4a7273f29304797b0f9b8f3ed8c963b.pdf http://www.arkive.org/afghan-tortoise/testudo-horsfieldii/.htm
http://www.sdturtle.org/RUSSIAN%20(Testudo%20Horsfieldii)%20CARE%20SHEET.htm http://www.russiantortoise.org/index.htm
http://cites.org/eng/search/site/afghan tortoise.htm
For the link below the 2nd video is very informative "So you want to adopt" The tort they show is the California native tortoise but he is a desert dweller too so he is similar.
http://www.sdturtle.org/#!video/c1bf2
http://animaldiversity.org/accounts/Testudinidae/.htm
last but not least the Afghanistan page look in the "Discussion Forum" I'm not sure about anyone else but if you see Tashiq he was nice and had alot of info that he seemed excited to share.
http://www.afghanistans.com/
http://media.wix.com/ugd/840bd6_e4a7273f29304797b0f9b8f3ed8c963b.pdf http://www.arkive.org/afghan-tortoise/testudo-horsfieldii/.htm
http://www.sdturtle.org/RUSSIAN%20(Testudo%20Horsfieldii)%20CARE%20SHEET.htm http://www.russiantortoise.org/index.htm
http://cites.org/eng/search/site/afghan tortoise.htm
For the link below the 2nd video is very informative "So you want to adopt" The tort they show is the California native tortoise but he is a desert dweller too so he is similar.
http://www.sdturtle.org/#!video/c1bf2
http://animaldiversity.org/accounts/Testudinidae/.htm
last but not least the Afghanistan page look in the "Discussion Forum" I'm not sure about anyone else but if you see Tashiq he was nice and had alot of info that he seemed excited to share.
http://www.afghanistans.com/
