The RedFoot Tortoise

Helping educate current and potential owners of Redfoot tortoises on their husbandry, so they can have a healthy, active tortoise and the tortoise can express its normal behavior and live a long, healthy life.

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Redfoot Tortoise Intelligence

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The article excerpt and links below is to an article that gives examples of Redfoot Tortoise intelligence and presents a perfect example of why it’s important to have large, well planted indoor and outdoor enclosures for your tortoise and have it designed to not look like the pen of a Russian or Greek.

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For evidence of reptilian intelligence, one need look no further than the maze, a time-honored laboratory test. Anna Wilkinson, a comparative psychologist at the University of Lincoln in England, tested a female red-footed tortoise named Moses in the radial arm maze, which has eight spokes radiating out from a central platform. Moses’ task was to “solve” the maze as efficiently as possible: to snatch a piece of strawberry from the end of each arm without returning to one she had already visited.

“That requires quite a memory load because you have to remember where you’ve been,” Dr. Wilkinson said.

Moses managed admirably, performing significantly better than if she had been choosing arms at random. Further investigation revealed that she was not using smell to find the treats. Instead, she seemed to be using external landmarks to navigate, just as mammals do.

Things became even more interesting when Dr. Wilkinson hung a black curtain around the maze, depriving Moses of the rich environmental cues that had surrounded her. The tortoise adopted a new navigational strategy, exploring the maze systematically by entering whatever arm was directly adjacent to the one she had just left. This approach is “an enormously great” way of solving the task, Dr. Wilkinson said, and a strategy rarely seen in mammals….More at Coldblooded Does Not Mean Stupid – New York Times

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All tortoises possess a highly developed localized intelligence and problem solving capability which helps them survive in their respective natural environments.

Redfoot’s spend the bulk of their lifetime in dense tropical rainforests which present all kinds of difficulty in getting around and finding food. Without this problem solving capability and their highly developed sense of smell surviving in this type of environment would be next to impossible.

All of this is why you must provide your Redfoot tortoise with large and well planted indoor and outdoor enclosures where they can utilize these skills to forage for food and get enough exercise.

Tortoises are not a pet you can stick in a glass aquarium on a substrate of old newspaper feed commercial food look at them a couple of times a day and expect them to survive, let alone thrive.

They need a stimulating environment in order to act as their DNA has wired them to and it’s up to you to either do the research to determine whether you can provide the type of environment they need to survive and thrive.

Redfoot Tortoises and Commercial Food

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The right diet for your Redfoot tortoise is actually easy to duplicate at home, but any visit to your local pet store makes it seem like companies have completely figured out everything a tortoise could need and put it in either a can or pellets.

Well, nothing could be further from the truth. . and here’s why.

Most canned or pelleted foods developed for tortoises are grain based and were developed for shelf life and with a complete misunderstanding of tortoise anatomy.

There has been quite a bit of research lately on grain based diets in tortoises and that research shows a diet high in grains causes serious health issues, particularly around pyramiding.

Before I go into how this happens first answer this question.

How often in the wild does a Redfoot tortoise come across a field of wheat, alfalfa, or oats?

Exactly. . . . . .never.

So what would make someone think a diet based on the following items would be a solid base for a Redfoot or any tortoise for that matter?

  • Suncured Oat Hay
  • Suncured Timothy Hay
  • Soybean Hulls
  • Wheat Middlings
  • Suncured Alfalfa Meal
  • Dehulled Soybean Meal
  • Whole Ground Wheat

Those are the primary items of most pellet based tortoise foods.

To believe the consumption of the vitamins, minerals, and fiber in the above ingredients by your Redfoot tortoise would be processed the same way as the fruit, mushrooms, carrion, mammal feces, and local plant matter they consume shows just how little the companies behind these foods understand tortoise anatomy.

These grain based diets are typically high in omega 6 fatty acids which have shown to have a negative effect on their health, just as they do in humans.

Grains, and how the tortoise digestive system processes them, can also cause leaching of calcium from their bones.

Grains are also high in phytate, which among other things, binds with iron, zinc, manganese and calcium, and slows their absorption. Phytates aren’t issues when consumed in small quantities, but if you’re feeding your Redfoot a significant portion of grain based food items what starts as a small issue becomes a big one because like humans tortoises lack the enzyme phytase needed to break them down.

And in higher quantities Vitamin D absorption can become blocked and because forest tortoises don’t typically process Vitamin D via sunshine as do arid species like Greek’s and Russian’s, so this can have greater implications for Redfoot’s.

This interference with Vitamin D processing of calcium is one of the reasons for pyramiding in tortoises. There are other factors, like lack of exercise, too cold and too dry an enclosure, but never ignore diet as a critical piece of this problem.

When you stick with natural items like papayas, mangoes, figs, plums, raspberries, melons, mushrooms, turnip greens, dandelions, endive, escarole, collard greens, and other items with a positive calcium to phosphorus ratio you KNOW your Redfoot is getting a diet as close as possible to what consume in the wild.

So avoid commercial food because you’re now aware of the problems it can cause to your Redfoot tortoise and you wallet.

Here’s a handy list of the best foods to feed your Redfoot tortoise by Calcium to Phosphorus ratio and the Oxalate level of the food item.

Calcium- Phosphorus and Oxalate food items

The Results Of The Right Redfoot Tortoise Diet

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This will be a short, but important post on what you can expect your Redfoot tortoise to look like at various stages of its life by following the diet and husbandry I have used and suggest to you.

The diet of the Redfoot tortoise should be 60% fruit, 35% greens, and 5% animal protein.  This diet replicates as much as is possible in captivity their wild diet.

It’s what I’ve used for the 12+ years of my keeping Redfoot tortoises and the pictures below show you want yours should look like if you do the same.

This first picture is one of my hold back’s that hatched in late 2012 and at the time of this picture was roughly 7 month sold.  Notice the perfect carapace, no pyramiding in the least.

7 Month old Redfoot tortoise

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This next picture is one the 2 year old Redfoot’s I recently sold to a family in Florida.

Again, you can see that 2 years into its life and almost 4 inches in length with no pyramiding.

2 year old Redfoot

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lastly, here is my 12+ year old female who was about the same size of the 7 month old when I purchased her and two others from a breeder in South Carolina. Today she is 12 inches long and weights in at 10 lbs.

She has very slight pyramiding (my male looks the same shell-wise) which is common because it is impossible to replicate the exact environment and diet in the wild, even if you live in southern Florida.

I also attribute it to the fact we live in a suburb of Minneapolis, Minnesota which only allows us to have them outside 3-4 months a year where they can get normal exercise by wandering around our 1/4 acre fenced in backyard.

Female Redfoot Tortoise

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The amount of exercise these tortoises get impacts the overall health of their carapace and plastron.

So, if you want your Redfoot tortoise to look very close to their wild cousins and be healthy to the point they never have any need to go to the vet, follow my diet and habitat suggestions and this is what yours will look like throughout their life.

Here’s a handy list of the best foods to feed your Redfoot tortoise by Calcium to Phosphorus ratio and the Oxalate level of the food item.

Calcium- Phosphorus and Oxalate food items