'Is this a tortoise?' 'No, sir. That is a gecko'

I went to the pet store with only the intention of browsing. I didn’t even know if they would have any tortoises or turtles in the place.


Before I go further, you must know that the internet is abuzz with advice against purchasing a tortoise at “most pet stores.” There is a genuine, urgent, legitimate concern that – in the case of the Russian Tortoise – the animals are scavenged from the wild, inhumanely crated together like so many cantaloupes and shipped to retailers replete with parasites, one another’s wastes and diseases, malnutrition, dehydration and, to say the least, a broken spirit.

The animal kingdom does not have a word for “unfortunate,” but all animals instinctively sense the concept.

This is why deer and rabbits and some of my co-workers are “spooked” by unfamiliar sounds or scents. If they could speak, they would say, “I don’t know what that is, but I don’t want anything unfortunate to happen. I must away, and with haste.” Face it – their grammar probably wouldn’t be that good, but it would be better than that of most texting teenagers.

The internet vehemently advises that prospective tortophiles avoid pet stores and obtain a tortoise directly from a reputable breeder. What you are looking for is a tortoise that is “bred in captivity,” or, as they say, “captive bred,” or CB.

In my case, I and my family have had a long history with this locally-owned pet shop. I have no suspicions that this pet shop is part of the dank underbelly of the world pet trade.

When our daughters were little girls, we used to take them to this very pet shop to look at the animals. This, and the fresh lobster tank at Wal-Mart, was as close as we could get to anything zoo-like.

“All of our turtles,” offered the nice staff lady, eventually, “are bred in captivity as pets.”

At the time, I didn’t need this reassurance. Afterwards, when the internet sort of coughed in my face about buying from a pet store, I was glad she had mentioned it.

At first, I saw only the one aquatic tank at the store with three red-eared sliders treading water on the surface there. I knew this because the sign on the glass said, “Red-Eared Sliders.” These struck me as being fairly large – sort of oblong with a 10-inch shell down the length – with stunningly beautiful rivulets of color along their bodies.

On the up side, these attractive animals were only $19.95 each. The down side was significant: For indoors, I would need an aquatic apparatus with all the machinery and elbow grease that goes along with a glass tank of water in the house. People who know stuff about turtles and tortoises (and know the difference) call this the “habitat” or the “enclosure.”

I was concerned about how watery everything had to be. I certainly have no pond on my graham-cracker-sized blot of property. Not counting the hole in the street that fills up with water whenever it rains, I have nothing to offer a red-eared slider except a premature demise after a brief, pathetic existence.

The required habitat for the sliders seemed impractical for me, as much as I wanted to scoop up the three of them in my arms, pay the 60 bucks and rush them to my claw-foot bathtub at the house and name them after The Three Stooges; The Three Musketeers; Harry, Hermione and Ron; Frodo, Sam and Gandalf; or any of the hundreds of teams of three my culture had handed me over the years (Little Joe, Hoss and Adam) (Chip, Robbie and Mike-or-Ernie) (Domingo, Carreras and Pavoratti). It is endless.

Aquaticism aside, the sliders need to eat live creatures, so I would be dealing with worms, feeder crickets and (ick) blood worms. (I don’t even know what they are, but, ick.)

Also, they emit what study-weary herpetological experts refer to as “an odor” – Latin, aromatus excruciotatis.

Still, the RES, as it is known, is a fascinating, wonderful and beautiful creature.

At my house, I feared, we would both be miserable, not to mention my wife.