As some of you have picked up, I read peer-reviewed articles on turtle.
Well, here is something I wrote to herpetologist I know on an article I read yesterday.
I read a paper by [names removed because I don't want you guys to send hate mail 
] (at Miami of Ohio) published in 1990 called "Natural freeze tolerance in the terrestrial turtle, Terrapene carolina" (the rest of the info: The Journal of Experimental Zoology 254:228-232)
They experimentally froze live turtles of the species T. c. carolina, judged when ice formed from when the heat of fusion was released, did some calorimetric analysis.... And then I read at the beginning of the Results section: "Following freezing, all 19 turtles behaved normally, indicating thta they had recovered within 3 days of testing." Then there is a superscript "1" after this sentence. So I go look at the footnote (in very small print) for this: "All turtles met our criteria for survival; however, four individuals later died (7, 10, 22, and 24 days) after testing. The period of cold acclimation (and food denial) for these turtles was significantly (Student's t test, P = 0.020) longer than for survivors and may have contributed to their demise."
!!!!
Gee, do you think so? Turtles don't die that easily all on their own. I suspect the act of freezing itself probably didn't make the turtles suffer, since their nervous system was probably shut down, but whatever the freezing did to them probably DID cause them to suffer.
I've read a number of papers where box turtles are killed, but at least the others had little suffering in the death.
