wkbuckle
New Member
I ask for suggestions on how to get my hermanns tortoise to eat greens or anything thats not green beans out of a can. Seems like it is a very common problem, makes me feel a little better but would still like to have suggestions
Seems my problem is common one.
- Thread starter wkbuckle
- Start date
Here is a response I typed up for another thread explaining how to introduce new foods:
If the tortoise is refusing new foods it is because you are trying to go too fast. You are using too much too soon. Start with smaller amounts, mince up and spray the main greens with water, and mix in the new stuff. Imagine only one micro gram of the new stuff. Neither you nor the tortoise could even tell it as there. Two micrograms the next day. Still undetectable. Eventually, you will have one full gram of new stuff mixed into a 300 gram pile of food. That's a 1:300 ratio. Again, the tortoise won't even be able to detect that amount. If you start this process with 1:10 ratio, the tortoise will clearly see and smell the new stuff and be put off by it. Getting them to eat new foods is a very slow process. It can take weeks or months for each new food. Because they live so long, it is worth it to invest this time.
Likewise with the calcium. If you can visibly see or feel calcium on the food, you have used WAY too much. Think about how much of that calcium I could put on YOUR food until you could even detect it. To start with, there would be so little, that you wouldn't have any way of even knowing it was there. Now if I piled a heaping teaspoon on top of your steak, you'd be put off and disgusted by it, right?
Another principal is training. Your tortoise has trained you to give him what he wants. If he doesn't like what you are offering, all he has to do is wait a little while, and you will reward him with what he desires. Tortoises can go days and weeks with no food at all. Missing a meal or two is nothing to a tortoise. One of my favorite axioms goes like this: A hungry tortoise is not a picky tortoise. Make him hungry. Before trying to introduce a new food, feed a reduced ration for several days. Not one or two days, but at least 3 or 4 days. Don't starve him, but your tortoise should be pacing around and feeling antsy. Then introduce the pile of familiar food with the tiniest of tiny amount of new food minced and mixed in. It should be almost as if you've dropped the piece of lettuce on the floor and a tiny pice of "dust" (the new food...) stuck to it. It should not look like you took a handful of the minced old favorite food and rolled it around in the dirt and now it's all covered. Imagine you hadn't eaten much for days and I gave you a big helping of your favorite mashed potatoes and there were 3 tiny tiny flecks of parsley mixed in. You wouldn't even know the parsley was there. Even if you visibly saw the parsley, your brain would tell you that it's a piece of potato skin or pepper for seasoning. Now imagine I had you locked in a cell, you are losing weight and always hungry, and each day your helping of some delicious food that you love had one additional tiny fleck of some new food that you were unfamiliar with and would never eat on its own. The combination of desensitization and ravenous hunger would get you eating just about anything, would it not? Do not feel bad for your tortoise when there is a big pile of delicious nutritious food sitting right in front of it and it chooses to not eat. Just tell yourself: "Oh you don't want to eat today? Well you will be hungry tomorrow mister!"
