Friday’s impromptu tortoise rescue

I was working away at my laptop Friday afternoon when the front doorbell rang. It was a guy asking me if I was missing a tortoise. I was not, but I was curious, so I went to go see what was up.

The situation in a nutshell: a decent-sized male Sulcata or African spurred tortoise, Centrochelys sulcata, had gotten loose from somewhere. The guy who rang my doorbell had seen it crossing the street in front of my house, which is reasonably busy in the late afternoon on a Friday. He didn’t want the tortoise to get hurt, so he pulled over and parked his car, moved the tortoise to a sidewalk, and called Animal Control. Then he flagged down another guy who was out on a walk to mind the tortoise while he rang doorbells to see if anyone in the nearby houses was missing a tortoise.

So far so good. Except that by the time I got across the street to take a look, the random passerby tortoise-minder let the tortoise crawl under a minivan in someone’s driveway. Oops.

At this point, several facts about tortoises in general and about this particular tortoise become relevant:

1. Chances are that any tortoise of this size would have gotten wedged under the minivan.
2. This particular tortoise had gotten improper nutrition when it was young — too much protein for a species that mostly eats grass, leading to too-rapid growth and a carapace that was not smooth but pyramided. The too-tall, hook-shaped scutes were just perfect for getting caught on the various metal bars and pipes on the underside of an automobile.
3. Turtles and tortoises are unbelievably strong for their size, to a degree that is probably hard to imagine if you’ve never kept one. This male Sulcata was about 70lbs (I feel pretty qualified to guess since my dogs are currently 60 and 82lbs), and when he felt threatened he would dig his feet in and stand up as tall as he could. When he did that, he raised the minivan on its suspension by about a finger’s width.

Now the dimensions of the problem are clear. We couldn’t use a jack to lift the minivan, which didn’t belong to any of us — not the tortoise-finder, the tortoise-minder, nor me — but rather to a random semi-neighbor whose driveway happened to be tortoise-accessible. Absent lifting the vehicle, the only way to free the stuck tortoise was to sort of Tetris it backwards out of the tortuous mechanical cul-de-sac its pyramided scutes were stuck in. But every time we pushed or pulled on the tortoise, it would balk, dig its feet in, and stand up, slightly lifting the minivan and absolutely locking itself in place between a cement slab and a two-ton vehicle. So the program we settled on was this: wait for the tortoise to relax and lower its plastron to the ground, then slide it about an inch toward freedom, at which point it would freak out, stand up, and lock in, then we’d wait for it to relax again, vamp ’til fade.

Did I mention that it was a 70lb tortoise and we were lying full-length on the cement, arms outstretched, pushing and pulling with fingertips? It took a long time, and it was tiring. But also pretty cool, because hey, awesome animal encounter. Now I can add one-time tortoise-rescuer to one-time ostrich-herder and one-time pronghorn-racer on my life list. You know, the one titled “What Are the Freaking Chances?”

Eventually we did get the tortoise out from under the vehicle, no worse for the wear. He promptly took off at a blistering 1mph, but the small group on on-lookers herded him away from the street and away from any other vehicles to hide under. While they were doing that, I ran back across the street and got a collapsible wagon out of the garage. Got the tortoise into the wagon, shook hands all around, and tortoise-sat him for the five minutes or so until Animal Control arrived. I didn’t mean to end up in charge of a tortoise, but everyone else had other places to be, and when they heard that I was a professional biologist with a lot of first-hand turtle experience, my fate was sealed.

I had assumed that this would not be the first tortoise rodeo for the Animal Control crew. Sulcatas are reasonably popular in the pet trade, because they are cute as heck when they are little, and not everyone fully thinks through the commitment of owning an animal that can grow to 200lbs, dig a burrow 100 feet long, and live 150 or 200 years. From everything I’ve ever read and from my own personal experience, essentially all turtles and tortoises are champion diggers, surprisingly good climbers, and otherwise gifted escape artists. More than one person has said they’re surprised I didn’t volunteer to keep this tortoise. I was tempted — for about five seconds. But a Sulcata is a lifestyle choice, and one I am not prepared for. I don’t want to be the distraught owner with a two-foot hole under the backyard fence and a beloved pet loose in suburbia, crossing busy streets…slowly. Besides, I already have a turtle, and Easty and the dogs are plenty of pet action for me right now (and yes, my son London understands that with any luck, Easty will become his responsibility after I’m gone — box turtles are also century-plus commitments).

Anyway, the Animal Control guys confirmed that they get these big tortoises fairly often, they know how to care for them, and if the owner of this particular tortoise doesn’t come forward to claim him, he’ll go to a tortoise rescue. So I said farewell, and that was the end of my Friday afternoon tortoise adventure. But it is not the end of this little run of turtle posts, which started with Easty snacking on dog doo, and will continue with a speculative sauropod crossover. Stay tuned!

Source: https://svpow.com/2026/10/12/fridays-impromptu-tortoise-rescue/