Heh heh, for those who practice shotgun diets for failure to construct effective adaptations (yes, tortoises here), it means a lack of understanding on some level is present, be it about the types of plants the animals eat in the wild or the species' base nutritional requirements. This is a prevalent case. None of us knows exactly what the animals need, nutritionally, monitors, tortoises, crocs, any of them. We can, however, see which diets provide positive outcomes, and that is what this thread is about.



Much as with monitors, a captive-adapted improv-diet has proven successful with many tortoises (although, again, because of general differences between a veggie diet and whole-animal diet, you can't give it all to torts in a single package). I don't know if you've bred your animals, past the first generation, second, etc. Many people have. Not as many as with monitors, since monitors have more rapid generation turnovers than do tortoises. Just the same, captive improv-diets have proven successful for many species in captivity. Those are the species in which we were able to approximate the diet closely enough to meet the needs (complete nutrition and the right taste, texture, etc. with which to get the first need into the animal), much like mice for monitors that eat some rodents in the wild, or crickets for monitors that eat insects in the wild. The others, such as all of those South African itty-bitty species (tortoises again) are gone from the trade (virtually) because we couldn't approximate the diet (among other variables) in time.



The explanation I gave was not scientific and was not meant to sound as such. Contrarily, it was supposed to serve as a simplification. It was, as already stated in one response, the other half of the equation. It was the hard half. The original post was stressing the easy half (the results), as that poster has many times before. Why?, everyone asks. Everyone wanted calculations as to why a certain diet (mice or crickets) should work effectively. I thought that by summarizing the reason for such reasoning, some might see the light. By recessing into the shadows, how will you see the light? You have to want to get something out of the exchange. That's why anyone ever clicked on the forum icon here in the first place, right? All the best.

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