Now What?????

[sunkisseddragons]

OK, so I'll be honest here. I've read all the posts about mixing species and now I have a problem. I own a desert tortoise and now, a sulcata. I keep them both in my yard together. My desert is full grown and my sully is only 3 yo. I got the sully because a zoo near my house has sullys and deserts together. But now I'm thinking I may have made a mistake. I can't seperate them because I don't have another yard and I don't want to give up my Rosie (sully). The rescues are full of sulcatas that need homes, so that is not an option. If I had to give her up, is there anyone willing to take her. I can ship.

 

[Maggie Cummings]

So just run a fence across the middle making two spaces where there was just one before.

 

[sunkisseddragons]

Yeah, you know what-I must have had a temporary brain gliche.
I'm not finding a home for my sully. I love him/her too much. I'll figure out something else.

I read the posts on here about the damage they do, how big they get, crushing other torts, having very specific winter housing arrangments, their aggressiveness, and I get panicked sometimes that I'm going to have this 150 lb animal that I will not know what to do with.

But then I take a deep breath and hope that it will all be OK.

 

[Yvonne G]

Most of the sulcatas that are in the pet trade are captive bred. I really doubt you could get a wild caught sulcata anymore. So here's my story:

I take in unwanted, found and injured turtles and tortoises. This is just one instance of a recurring story that I hear:

The family had inherited an old desert tortoise (Gopherus agassizii) when their parents got too old to care for him anymore. They had him for several years. Then they saw this sulcata in a pet shop and decided their desert tortoise needed a companion. The sulcata was just a bit smaller than the desert tortoise, but he was a terrible bully, ramming and biting the desert tortoise.

So, what do they do? Do they bring me the sulcata that they've only had for a few months? NO!! They decide to give up the desert tortoise that had been in their family for over 60 years. They thought they were bringing me the tortoise because he was being injured by the sulcata, but after they left and I took a closer look at the tortoise, he was awfully ill. He had thick green mucous coming out his nose and he had to open his mouth every so often to gasp in some air.

I got this tortoise in August two years ago. I kept him up over the winter and administered antibiotics. At the end of the two week cycle, he still wasn't well, so I gave him a couple weeks rest then started the Baytril injections again. This went on all winter and most of the summer. I kept him up again last winter, and had to dose him on and off all winter. He was finally well enough to be adopted out this spring.

"Grampa" went to a loving home and I'm very pleased it worked out for him...but remember my first sentence in this post? This was a captive bred sulcata and he made that poor desert tortoise terribly ill. He wasn't ill from the stress of fighting, he was ill from the sulcata's pathogens.

Please take my word for it. Desert tortoises and sulcatas should never share the same grazing area.

Yvonne