Clicking, twitching and scratching at dinner.

[Billiam]

Hello again, everyone. I'm back with new concerns.

My Leopard tort has been doing fairly well. He's active, he's eating and drinking, and he's even got into the habit of climbing on his artificial plant.

However, when he's eating a number of things are happening. Firstly, his jaw seems to be clicking. Then, when he gets the piece of food he was after, he sets it in is mouth and his head an neck twitch quickly once or twice to one side or the other. Then, before swallowing, he rubs both sides of his mouth as if he were trying to break off more of the leaf. Any ideas what might be going on here?

 

[dmmj]

The clicking is fairly common, and harmless. It comes and goes with many tortoises. As for the other one thing reallyonly comes to mind. The food bites he is taking may seem to big to the tortoise, and he may be trying to swallow food he thinks is to big.

 

[Yvonne G]

...or it may be stuck on the roof of his mouth. Try cutting it up in bite-size pieces and see if he still does it.

 

[mini_max]

When we first got Max, he did some similar maneuvers. My own diagnosis was that he was getting too much in his mouth. And my feeling is when you chop small, they are stuck with the size of bite you're giving them, as they can't manuver small pieces very easily. So we settled on leaving things big so that he was able to get a hold of the food with his feet and bite off exactly what he could chew. This did help.