What exactly do you mean by Perfectly "legit" ?.....
Because your animals pyramided with calcium and sunshine that means nothing. How do you know how much calcium the animals where getting? did you measure it?, how much vit D3 from sunshine? was it sunny all the time? did u have them out exactly for the same amount of tim? How do you know if they weren't calcium and vit d deficien? Did you do any blood tests?if so what did you measure and at what intervals? How big of a group did you use? Over what period of time? Maybe you didn't follow them long enough? did you have a control group? What was the humidity every day? what was it at different times of the day?where any of them ill? maybe they were stressed out from not being "overfed." How do you define and quantify pyramiding?Did you measure in millimeters or just looked at it?. How much pyramiding occurred and over what period of time?. which periods showed more pyramiding. anyone can go on and on about this, which was my original point, there are too many confounding factors that looking at blood levels of vit d and bone density scans can give us something objective and irrefutable.
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Legitimate. Valid. Holding up to the scrutiny of the scientific community. Clear enough?
Those are a whole bunch of ridiculous inflammatory questions. They don't deserve a response.
You need to come back to the real world where regular people have tortoises as pets and share rational, real world observations. A normal, healthy tortoise who is out in the Southern CA sun several hours almost every day should certainly be making enough D3 for the purposes of our discussion. The exact amount produced and measured by the hour is not relevant.
You are still dodging the issue. If you want to be taken seriously you need to explain how all of my observations and the same observations of many others are wrong.
BTW, who are you? What species do you keep and how many? How many decades of practical, real world experience do you have to back up what you are saying?
If we are all so wrong and off base, then surely you must have the CORRECT answer to this enigma. Please enlighten us. All I hear you saying is that we are wrong and jumping to conclusions. Logically, if you know that we are wrong, then you must also know what is right, right? You keep saying that we don't have the scientific basis to be making these claims, but I'm not hearing any scientific facts to back up yours.
It is absurd and foolish to just blatantly disregard decades of hands on experience. All the science in the world can't be substituted for years of professional hands on work. Remember the top scientists of the world used to think the world was flat and defended that premise vigorously. All it took was one guy to sail around a little bit and say, "hey, I didn't fall off the edge".
Anyhow, unless you can come back with something better than your last few posts, I'll just leave you to your opinion. You raise your tortoises how you want and I'll do the same. In a few years time we'll have living proof that one or the other of us was wrong. Maybe we should leave the debate until then. Once one or the other of us is able to raise up some smooth ones. Until then, the WHOLE discussion is nothing but academic anyway.