Tortoise Plant Destruction

[Tortqueries]

Hello, I hope we are well!

I'm having some issues with my male greek tortoise. I upgraded his indoor enclosure by converting a small storage room into a tortoise table. Had it decked out with rocks to climb over, different substrate in different areas, and around 10 plants in there that I had the intention of adding to as time goes on, with the hope that some of plants grew bigger.

He seemed to love it and everything else is working well, he's done some rearranging (moving a little shelter around, digging/mixing the substrate together etc) but the only thing I'm having issues with is that he has destroyed all the plants in there.

I then added 5 more, this time they were big ones, he destroyed those too.

Overall I've probably tried planting around 40 plants in this enclosure but each time he destroys them before they've even had chance to acclimatise. And I don't just mean eaten them, I mean full on crushed them into oblivion.

The only thing I can think of to do next is just buy 100 plants of varying sizes, bundle them together in different areas of the enclosure and hope that they create enough of a wall that he isn't able to destroy them. But I don't want to spend all that money for him to just obliterate them again but then I see his enclosure all empty of life and it just looks sad, surely he needs this enrichment. Am I missing something crucial here?

I would love to get some advice!

Thank you

PS I also wonder if he just needs to be walking more and considering buying one of those cat wheels that I've seen tortoises use online, does anyone have any success with them?

 

[Littleredfootbigredheart]

Hello and welcome to the forum!

Lol this is something a lot of folks trying to plant in indoor set ups struggle with, myself included

There are multiple ways to tackle this though so they don’t have direct access to rip them up/trample on them, you could try adding a plant shelf for example, I know @Alex and the Redfoot has had some success with this
We personally take a pot and weigh it down with some stones in the bottom, then adding the soil and plant on top, the weight hopefully stops them pushing it over, allowing the plant to get established in its pot, this can if course take up a bit of walking room depending how many you add, so another suggest is having them on top of hides(depending what yours are like?)
Here’s a photo of our set up for some inspiration, all weighted down by rocks(it says ‘after’ because I’d taken before shots)



Maybe we could get a photo of yours? Might help with coming up with some suggestions for you

As for the wheel, there are folks that have modified large rodent wheels, perhaps have a search on here, I’m sure there’s a thread or two on it