TortyMomma
New Member
I am so upset. In September, I adopted a baby sulcata and my bffs parents adopted two babies. One passed away early on but I just thought it got sick or was failure to thrive. I haven’t seen their other one because whenever I went over they had it in the back room. Meanwhile, mine has gotten really big and is healthy. She has an enclosure with Kellogg organic soil, coconut coir, and sphagnum moss and mulch. We have a hot side taking up 3/4 of her planter enclosure with two heat lamps along with her uvb lamp and we keep it moist and covered with a shower curtain so it retains heat. There’s wooden bridges and two huts, her water dish and food dish. Her cool side she has hut and we keep it dry. We feed her tortoise food that we soak in water and soak her for 15 mins every few days because she stays hydrated with the water in her food. She also gets spring mix and zucchini, everything else she won’t touch. No grass, carrots, strawberries, dandylions, nothing she’s super picky. We recently took her to the vet and treated her uri. She’s healthy. Anyways, They are a year old this month. Tell me why I go to my best friends house and I go to their enclosure and I see a tiny tiny tiny tortoise. I kept saying you guys got a new baby your other one died? And they were saying no, that that was the same baby they adopted a year ago. I really thought they were messing with me. It is so small. Looks sickly, so skinny and the underbelly of the shell is soft. All they feed it is flowers and zucchini and they soak it every day in a big bin of water that it has no way of getting up from I’m surprised it hasn’t drowned. It just lays in the water fully submerged. I told them I’m “taking it for a few weeks because it isn’t looking good and I want to see how it does at my house”. I don’t think I will ever give this poor baby back. They kept him in dry wood chips Substrate In a wooden planter with no heat lamp or uvb lamp with water, zucchini, a hut, and grass. She said it used to have a red lamp but it went out. Just look at the pictures. Just look at him compared to my tortoise. Is there anything I should do? We brought it home and it ate tortoise kibble and was so starving. We tried to soak it in just a little bit of water and still it just submerged itself and wouldn’t come up. He still walks around fine and is active but also sleepy. When you pick him up it feels like you’re holding a piece of paper. I don’t know how to help him survive, he is a year old and smaller than when they first got him at three months old!