Why a baby tortoise and toddlers don't mix

It's 2:14 AM and I'm standing in my living room using a digital meat thermometer to measure the ambient soil temperature of a wooden box. Inside this box is a creature roughly the size of a rich tea biscuit that currently commands more square footage in our London flat than my own wardrobe. This all happened because, three weeks ago, in a moment of extreme sleep-deprived vulnerability, I saw a handwritten advert for a baby tortoise for sale in a local pet shop window and thought it would be a quiet, dignified, low-maintenance companion for my two-year-old twin girls.

I was so unfathomably wrong about every single aspect of this transaction that I'm actually impressed with my own stupidity.

There's a persistent cultural myth that these little shelled creatures are basically pet rocks that occasionally eat a piece of lettuce. You just pop them in a plastic tub, tap the shell affectionately, and leave them to outlive you. The reality is that keeping one of these animals alive requires the sort of precise environmental engineering usually reserved for premature infants and rare orchids.

The great reptile panic of Tuesday afternoon

Before you even get to the electrical requirements, there's the biological reality of what you've brought into your home. The girls, naturally, were utterly transfixed by him. They can't quite pronounce "Terry" yet, so they just aggressively point at the enclosure and shout "Baby T!" whenever they enter the room.

I thought it was charming until a casual chat with our GP, Dr. Evans, during a routine checkup for the girls' endless nursery colds. He looked at me with deep, exhausted pity and explained that reptiles are essentially walking biological weapons that naturally harbour salmonella in their digestive tracts, shedding it all over their shells and their soil like confetti.

According to his rather urgent explanation, the NHS and most sane doctors strongly suggest keeping anything with scales completely out of households with children under five, because two-year-olds have absolutely zero concept of cross-contamination and will happily stroke a reptile and then immediately put their entire fist into their mouths. So now, our daily routine involves me guarding the wooden box like a bouncer at a Mayfair club, deploying military-grade hand washing protocols if a toddler so much as breathes near the enclosure, and constantly sanitising the surrounding floorboards.

I'm now an amateur heating engineer

You can't put these things in a glass fish tank because they don't understand the concept of transparent barriers and will just pace against the glass until they lose their tiny minds from stress. Instead, you've to buy a massive, shallow wooden tray called a "tortoise table" that takes up half the room.

Then comes the lighting. A baby tortoise requires a highly specific thermal gradient to survive, meaning one side of the box has to be 35 degrees Celsius while the other side sits comfortably at 25 degrees, requiring a complex rig of ceramic heat emitters and terrifyingly expensive UVB bulbs that mimic the actual sun so their shells don't deform into horrible pyramids.

Because of this artificial sun blazing in our living room 12 hours a day, the ambient temperature of our flat has risen to the point where I'm sweating through my t-shirts in November. The twins, consequently, have been living almost exclusively in their Organic Cotton Baby Bodysuit Sleeveless Infant Onesies. It was actually the smartest thing I bought during this whole debacle, mostly because the undyed organic cotton means they don't get awful heat rashes when the living room hits Sahara temperatures, and the stretchy necklines make it incredibly easy to strip them down when I inevitably panic that they've somehow got reptile soil on their sleeves.

You also have to soak the tortoise in a shallow terracotta plant saucer of lukewarm water for fifteen minutes every single day so he doesn't dehydrate, which is exactly as thrilling as it sounds.

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The hundred year inheritance

Perhaps the most terrifying part of this entire ordeal was the day I almost bought the wrong species. When I was in the shop, the owner tried to steer me toward a Sulcata, which is an African spurred tortoise. It was the size of a 50-pence piece and ridiculously cute.

Thankfully, I did exactly three minutes of frantic googling in the aisle and discovered that these specific babies rapidly balloon into 100-pound armour-plated bulldozers that can dig through structural foundations and live for 150 years. I realised I wasn't buying a pet; I was buying a heavy burden that my daughters would eventually have to write into their own wills. We went with a Russian tortoise instead, which supposedly caps out at a manageable eight inches, though he still looks at me with an ancient, judgmental disdain that suggests he knows he'll outlive me.

Things that actually belong in a mouth

The irony of trying to keep a baby tortoise alive is that you spend half your day worrying about what it's eating (you've to forage for specific, pesticide-free weeds because supermarket lettuce gives them the runs), and the other half worrying about what your toddlers are chewing on.

Right now, the twins are getting their molars, which means they've the bite force of an angry crocodile. While Terry the tortoise is quietly munching on a dandelion I illegally harvested from a local park, the girls are desperately trying to gnaw on the edges of the coffee table. The only thing that has saved our furniture is the Panda Teether Silicone Baby Bamboo Chew Toy. I'm genuinely obsessed with this thing. It has these brilliant little textured ridges that the girls instinctively gnaw on, and because it's 100% food-grade silicone, I can just throw it in the dishwasher when it inevitably gets dropped near the danger zone of the tortoise enclosure. It's perfectly flat and wide, meaning they can hold it themselves while I'm busy doing something absurd like dusting calcium powder onto a pile of weeds.

I also bought the Gentle Baby Building Block Set around the same time, thinking maybe they would quietly stack them and learn their numbers while I managed the reptile humidity levels. They're fine as blocks go—squishy, safe to step on in the dark, and they don't have any nasty chemicals. But my children have absolutely no interest in building with them. They just stack three of the macaron-coloured cubes and then launch them like soft missiles at the side of the tortoise table. They serve their purpose as a distraction, I suppose, even if the educational aspect is currently lost on them.

So, if you're a time-strapped parent looking for a simple, easy pet to introduce to your toddler, step away from the reptile enclosure. Buy a goldfish. Better yet, buy a very realistic stuffed animal. Leave the prehistoric creatures to people who honestly enjoy maintaining botanical heat zones in their living rooms.

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The messy truth about tiny tortoises

Are baby tortoises honestly dangerous for toddlers?
According to my increasingly exasperated doctor, yes. It's not that they're going to bite your kid (though they do have little beaks), it's the salmonella risk. They shed the bacteria in their poo, which gets in the soil, which gets on their shell. If your toddler touches the shell and then eats a fistful of raisins, you're going to have a very bad time at A&E.

Can I just keep a tortoise in a glass fish tank?
No, and I learned this the hard and expensive way. Tortoises don't understand glass. They just see the room continuing on the other side and will aggressively walk into the invisible wall for ten hours straight until they make themselves ill from stress. You need an opaque tub or a wooden tortoise table.

Why do people say they're expensive to keep?
Because the tortoise itself costs about seventy quid, but the equipment to keep it alive costs a small fortune. You have to buy specific UVB tube lights that simulate the sun so their bones don't melt, and you've to replace those bulbs every six months even if they still light up, because the invisible UV output drops. Plus, your electricity bill will spike from running heat lamps all day.

Do they really need a bath every day?
When they're babies, yes. It turns out they're terrible at drinking from bowls and lose moisture rapidly under those massive heat lamps. You have to soak them in warm, shallow water (just up to their chin so they don't drown) for about 15 minutes. It helps them stay hydrated and encourages them to poo in the water rather than in their enclosure, which is mildly convenient I suppose.

What happens if I accidentally buy a Sulcata?
You will eventually need to give up your garden to a creature the size of a small tractor. They look like tiny, adorable pebbles when they hatch, but they grow monstrously fast and will outlive your grandchildren. Stick to a Hermann's or a Russian tortoise if you insist on bringing one of these things home.