Cape Town - The Cape of Good Hope (CoGH) SPCA recently returned 174 indigenous tortoises to the wild, saving them from a lifetime of being unsuitable pets.
The CoGH SPCA said four tortoise species occur in relative abundance across the Western Cape: the leopard tortoise, angulate tortoise, padloper (the world’s smallest tortoise), and the tent tortoise, so-named for its appearance of having little tents pitched across its shell.
The CoGH SPCA’s Wildlife Department receives around 19 tortoises a month that are either surrendered by people who have made the mistake of thinking that tortoises make good pets, or which are confiscated by the organisation or the provincial wildlife conservation authorities due to being kept in terrible conditions not suitable for tortoises to live in.
“The type of tortoise we most often rescue is the angulate tortoise (Chersina angulata). With its beautiful shell markings and an ability to survive in most conditions, this is the species that often finds itself being picked up in the wild and taken home to be kept as someone’s pet, eaten, harvested for traditional medicine or sold on the illegal pet market,” the organisation detailed in a statement.
It is a protected species under the Nature Conservation Ordinance 19 of 1974 (as amended in 2000), and these reptiles may not be collected from the wild, transported, kept, imported into or exported from the Western Cape without special permission in the form of a permit from CapeNature.
The next most popular species found is the leopard tortoise (Stigmochelys pardalis), which besides being the continent’s largest tortoise (adults can weigh upwards of 50 kg), are also extremely long-lived with individuals having been recorded living to over 100 years.
“We also receive padlopers, another threatened species in the Western Cape, very popular on the overseas pet trade due to their small size, and to a lesser extent tent tortoises.
“It is how we came to have 174 tortoises of all four species, collected over a period of just seven months, needing to be released back into the wild,” the SPCA said.
Having been given a suitable release site carefully chosen for each by CapeNature, it was next a job of getting the relevant permits in order to transport and release tortoises, checking that all 174 tortoises were in the best of health and then packing them carefully into boxes for the long drive out into the wilds where they belong.
“Some of the older tortoises had been in captivity for most of their lives, but upon realising that they were going back in the environment they were born into, immediately seemed to smile.
“Upon their release, some settled down right away to munch on tasty fynbos while others ran off just as fast as their short little legs could carry them to begin their new lives back in nature,” the SPCA said.
The keeping of tortoises in captivity has had a serious impact on wild-living populations over the years, they added.
Cape Times