Little George Won’t Be So Little
We recently added a new addition to our family of tortoises… A SULCATA!
At 3 months old, this Sulcata aka African spurred tortoise hatchling is awesome! After several long days of deciding on a name, we all agreed on “George” assuming he is male. Should we discover George is a lady, George will become Georgie, wink, wink. My educated guesses on gender so far have been darn good…I’m running at a 75% success rate (3 of 4 Russian hatchlings have been spot on I’m proud to share). We re-homed George from another successful Craigslist find. A fellow tortoise lover was moving out of state and unable to take this little cookie with him. Honestly, another tortoise and another species was not my intention. I was ISO an additional reptile house. As the cool weather moves in, so do the Russian torts. With all 6 RTs coming in this cold season, I was looking to build an addition onto one of the existing houses. George was being re-homed along with his house at a great price. Originally I was thinking of re-homing the Sulcata after ensuring he is healthy – that idea lasted about 15 minutes. With a 90 minute drive home, we all agreed that keeping this Sulcata hatchling was worth his future size. We can safely anticipate at minimum a 50+ lbs tortoise in 10 years. We carefully reviewed our care and housing plans for this future giant – Sulcata Tortoises are the 3rd largest in the world behind Galapagos and Aldabra tortoises. Luckily we have time. That said, in the first week of caring for this beauty he gained 4g, totaling 56grams. It may not seem like much, but his poo is as big as he is.
Click here for a Video of George 🐢
Happy tortoise keeping.
The Tortoise Keeper 