STANDARD-EXAMINER (Ogden, Utah) 12 October 05 Turtles & tortoises (Charles Trentelman)
Ogden: The image of a cute baby turtle in a little plastic pond with one of those little plastic palm trees drives Nita Vono nuts because, to her, that setup is a death trap.
"They have to slide up under their food," she said, illustrating with her hands a turtle of that variety swimming up to feed, something like a shark eating a surfer.
"So you'd put it in the tray and put its food in the dish and he'd starve to death because he couldn't eat it," she said.
Pet stores are no longer allowed to sell turtles smaller than 4 inches, mostly because they spread salmonella, but also because so many baby turtles ended up dead.
That doesn't keep Vono from encountering plenty of horror stories as she cares for, and rescues, her hard-shelled friends.
Like, for example, the guy who glued a handle to the shell of one, so his son could carry it around.
"What an idiot!" she screamed.
More than 40 turtles, tortoises and assorted shelled reptiles live in, and around, her home on Ogden's east bench. There is also a husband living there, but, she smiled as she said, "He's not into turtles, to tell the truth, but I have had turtles longer than him."
Turtles live longer than husbands, too.
Vono, an Ogden area real estate agent, has been collecting and raising turtles since she was a child. Her first experience was not good.
"It got away and died, and I was brokenhearted," she said.
When she was 17, she got another, vowed it would live and be happy, and when she moved away to college two years later, she took a 50-gallon aquarium and four turtles with her.
They've been with her ever since, and her husband was in the military, meaning her turtles did some serious traveling.
To ponder her current bale (a bale is a bunch of turtles) is to consider some serious numbers and varieties: She has yard turtles, pond turtles, aquarium turtles and den turtles scattered all over.
Where there aren't turtles, there are paintings and statues of them on the walls and tables in case the eye should grow despondent at not, for some rare moment, seeing a turtle.
Even the laundry room is full of them, mostly in tanks. The laundry is elsewhere.
They are slow, but they do get around. The backyard is completely fenced. The ones that den underground need cages with wired screens buried deep enough so the critters can dig a den but not an escape tunnel.
Her backyard, in which most of her pets live during the summer, shows the sort of dedication a prospective turtle owner should expect: Caged areas, dens and habitats are everywhere, each set up for a particular type of turtle. Where there aren't cages there is a natural pond in which 17 turtles live.
She brought out Sherman, her African spurred sulcata, the third-largest tortoise variety in the world.
At the moment, he is only 3 years old and is about a foot across.
She put him on the ground and he started, slowly but steadily, heading toward a low hole in which, Vono said, he would hide.
"He" is a presumption on Vono's part. Sherman will be 25 before anyone knows his sex, she said, and when Sherman (or Shermette) is 150 years old, he/she will be about 3 feet across.
That worries her husband because he doesn't expect Vono to live 150 years and is unsure what to do with her turtles. She said there are numerous turtle adoption agencies for just that eventuality.
She does a lot of that now. Adoption and rescue work takes up a lot of her normal conversation. The problem is that too many people buy turtles who should not.
The turtles that are sold most commonly are called red-eared sliders. They have colorful shells, look cute when small, and poke their arms and legs in and out of their shells just as everyone expects turtles to do.
They also, too often, end up abandoned or dead.
"People buy the baby red-eared sliders, but what they don't realize is that they generally get 15 to 17 inches long," she said. "That's when they end up with me."
"Someone called a pet store with a couple of sick turtles," she said, and the store called her. "One was a red-eared slider smuggled up from Mexico. They kept him for nine months, just got tired of him and were just going to flush him down the toilet."
She showed it, a tiny thing, barely an inch and a half across, but she said it's 2 years old. He had been underfed and abused, she said, and so won't grow any more. "Sadly, he won't live real long," she said.
Her biggest frustration is parents who think turtles are good pets for children.
"People think they're a simple pet for kids, but they're not," she said. "They're a teenager pet, an adult pet, because the care is so complicated."
She saw an ad for one turtle in the newspaper, the pet of a 4-year-old child, and when she went to collect it, she took along a toy turtle as well.
"I gave the kid the toy turtle," she said. "What he wanted was something to play with."
She advises people pondering a turtle purchase to expect to spend 10 times the cost of the turtle on supplies and habitat. Each variety is different, demanding a particular diet, a particular climate, a particular habitat.
She knows all about that. Her electric bill is $400 a month for the heat lamps and lights they all need.
What she would like, she said, is a turtle house, a multifloor addition to her home with wet or dry habitat areas, depending on what each turtle needs.
That would mean building on an addition, she said, which would not be cheap.
That is why she is a real estate agent. She told her husband what she wanted, and he didn't say no.
"He said, 'Go earn the money.' "
Turtles & tortoises

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