If you have a tortoise what do you feed them?

[DontBiteTheBoobThatFeedsYou]

I was just googling whether I could give him celery or kale.

There's mixed opinions on what you can feed a tortoise on every website.

But I just found one which said cat/dog food is a good source of protein.

Surely not?!

I have 2 tortoise. Please do not feed them cat/dog food, my vet informed me this was not a good idea. About 80% of your pet tortoise's daily diet should be fresh vegetables, greens etc. Fruit: Apples, melon and grapes etc should make up no more than 20%. My tortoise have a lot of green leaf salad (not iceburg lettuce), they love tomato, grated carrot, grated apple and occasionally they have a commercial food mix.

It depends on the type of tortoise you have. We have a horsefield and she eats lambs' lettuce, rocket, kale (now and again), grated carrot and dandelion flowers (she loves these). It's all organic. She also has a calcium powder sprinkled over the top each day and a cuttlefish to keep her beak trim.

I definitely wouldn't give her meat.

He's a Herman tortoise and very fussy.

Hated the kale, won't touch commercial food and didn't even look at the cuttlefish.

1Lshel that's exactly the diet we have been doing until now so I'm glad I've been getting it right.

I have a tortoise. He tends to eat lettuce, tomato, cucumber, apple, pear. He likes strawberries too. Sometimes when I'm dog walking I'll gather dandelion flowers and leaves which he loves. If I put bread out for the birds he'll try eating that too! Recently I started giving him watermelon slices and he adores them, probably because he's getting tons of fluid from them too.

This is a picture of my guy doing some mountaineering on my dog!

Dontbitethehandthatfeedsyou, mine are Hermans too, they were not overfussed with Kale either :-), they enjoy grated cucumber too
TixieLix your dog and tortoise are GORGEOUS x

Oh I'd love a tortoise. Where do you go about finding one?

@Tickle (love your user name!) I think nowadays in the UK you can sometimes get them from pet shops or garden centres, but it's not advised to source them from there. There were loads in a big garden centre near me recently but they were very young and would need to be kept indoors. It's recommended to find a reputable breeder (Google is your friend!)

I've had mine over 20 years and obtained him from a neighbour whose mother was a breeder. I think they're quite expensive to buy now. Mine lives outdoors and refuses to be hibernated indoors through the colder months. He's like Houdini and escapes. The other year we tried again and he escaped from two boxes that were in our shed! We thought he'd been stolen but spring came around and he reappeared. Now we just let him do his own thing and he digs down in the bushy part of the garden when he's good and ready.

BTW, if you have an older tortoise that free roams in the garden, then forget about having nice flowers ever again! I have to fence off plants or put them in pots or high borders because he'll either eat it or trample it. When I do the weeding he's ALWAYS there traipsing up and down in the spot you're pulling weeds (although he's good for chomping any dandelions). He's quite a character .

Romaine lettuce. He can't get enough of it.

I thought that said BLW.

I was wondering how you go about doing baby led weaning with a tortoise 🧐

Dandelions mainly, also clover, honeysuckle. There are lots of weeds they can eat.

Lettuce etc does not have stuff in it to give them the nutrients they need but that, kale, brocolli etc are fine when you have both else. Strawberries as a treat now and then.

I have two 50 year old Herman females. They potter around my garden eating dandelions, clover and anything else they fancy.

They particularly like romaine lettuce, cucumber and tomato.

They also like peppers (especially red peppers), carrot and strawberries but these are all full of sugar so should be fed sparingly.

Have a look at this link for more info
www.thetortoisetable.org.uk/

Oh and mine are fussy little devils and won't touch most of what's on that list!

Dandelions, spinach, occasional fruit (not good for shell growth) you can get wild flower seeds which you can grow in tank so they can feed on them.

TixieLix your tortoise is not healthy on that diet. His shell is pyramiding which is a result of poor nutrition among other things.

Pyramiding

Can I stay here and be hopeful for more pictures of tortoises?? 😍

Hi

Most of the above posts are incorrect feeding.

Hermann tortoises should eat weeds grown in poor soil. There is an app called the Tortoise Table which can help identify these.

They should not eat any fruit at all and supermarket foods are not ideal. Spinach absolutely not. Lettuce no. Cucumber only if giving medication.

Weeds that are best are sow thistle, plantain, a few dandelions, mellow, geranium.

If you send me a message I can recommend a very good Facebook group.

Leave the cuttlefish out in the rain it's tastier old and smelly

Dandelions.

There’s a lot of poor advice on this thread Tortoises require UV light all year round to avoid metabolic bone disease and she’ll rot. Those of you keeping your tortoises outdoors are just storing up unpleasant medical problems for later . Problems like pyramiding of the shell shown above are a sign of metabolic bone disease.

See this link for reputable husbandry advice
www.tortoisetrust.org/Downloads/Taking_care_of_pet_tortoises_web.pdf

I have a 5 year old horsfield, at the moment we believe he is a boy. His time is split between a tortoise table in the living room, heated and lit by the worlds most expensive light bulb and an outdoor enclosure.

He lives on weeds and flowers from the garden. The Tortoise Table have a good website for identifying different plants and is they are edible or not. His breed are non fruit eaters and I've been told commercial pellets cause them to grow too fast.

Agree with Veterinari.

Sadly health problems in tortoises (and other reptiles) are really common due to poor husbandry, especially diet and a lack of UVB light.

As a couple of others have said above, they mainly want be eating weeds and flowers. They should also be supplemented with calcium. Fruit/lettuce/beans are not ok.

Please don't get a tortoise just because you think you'd love one

This was my mum and dads tortoise who lived until he was approximately 80 years old.
He was fed on a diet of lettuce cucumber and dandelions mainly but with occasional tomatoes and strawberries and peaches too. He also liked broccoli, mums flower bed and your fingers if they got too close!
He lived to see 5 generations of our family and is missed so much by my parents. They had his for 47 years and learnt to care for him through friends who had a tortoise. - it was long before the internet with its thousands of differing opinions on what’s best.
My mum would love another tortoise but has decided that getting a pet who would outlive her isn’t the wisest choice

Jesus Christ the advice on here is awful. Especially the poster who linked to the Tortoise Table website (10/10 - fantastic resource) yet says they feed tomatoes facepalm

A Hermann's tortoise should be fed a diet of appropriate weeds and flowers with suitable calcium and multivitamin supplements. They need access to UVB light for calcium metabolism and adequate heating with a temperature gradient of around 18 to 28-30 degrees so they can carry out metabolic functions. In the UK, apart from a few days a year, the UV index and temperature are not high enough for them to fend for themselves in the garden. Similarly with hibernation, they can't just be left to their own devices, that's how they die.

Plenty of people will tell you they have an ancient tortoise that has been fed XYZ and has hibernated itself every year, in reality, these animals that should live 100-110 years usually die at 50-70 (usually of liver failure due to poor diet and husbandry)

Please, please do some research and provide suitable diet, habitat and enrichment for your tortoises