is because dogs and cats are indeed a whole different care genre. Even birds are out of the park compared to traditional reptiles. The reason is that when it comes to keeping any of the first three, we don't wind up with animals that are completely environmentally-strapped.
What I mean by that is, birds, dogs, cats, even naked mole rats, regulate most of their physiologic processes from within. Since reptiles never developed insulating fat layers and tiny countless involuntary muscle contractions for temp regulation, they have to largely rely on their respective environments to properly maintain necessary metabolic functions. In order to manipulate their surroundings for optimal high and low metabolic rates, reptiles use behaviors that we don't see in most mammals and birds. This makes us less able to "relate" to them and their needs.
The funny thing is, give a keeper a functional understanding of how basic reptile phisiology works, how physiology alters reptile behavior, hints on how this applies to captive maintenance, and all of the potentially misleading care guides and magazines become obsolete. Once a keeper understands the basis for how and why reptiles live, and have to live, as they do, that keeper has a marked home field advantage. When understandings that allow the keeper to circumvent confusion by reading his or her own animals exists, things are all of a sudden comparatively simple. Believe it or not, that is what all of my long-windedness gets at - the simplicity that can come of a basic understanding of how and why reptiles function, and have to function, the way they do.
Reptile veterinarians address problems. This is a service needed by many reptile keepers. But, what my points get at are ways for keepers to address the factors that precipitate the problems, before the problems occur. In short, how do we properly understand and thus provide for these animals in order to cut a need for the vets' recovery services out? This can serve as a problem in and of itself, since many impulse keepers don't want to have to think for themselves. They want each species of reptile sold as or caught for a pet to come with setup and maintenance instructions, like a car, only presumably far cheaper. This is, of course, not possible. The most realistic way to approach such a desire is to learn the basics of reptile physiology and how that affects their behavior. From there, you are ready to tackle less known, more species- or locale-specific factors.
The problem with my suggested approach is, as you can see by the above obese paragraphs that merely describe the approach, it is initially learning-intensive and independent. Even though the applicable understandings that will come of the approach will likely make things clearer in the long run, care guides and pet books provide direct "authoritative" (funny word, if you think about it) answers that keepers want to hear. Those heavenly concrete instructions.
So, many people like care guides. Care guides are very rule-oriented. They go from a top-down approach. Details and specifics come first and generally are not backed up in strong context. Why? Consider that the information given can originate anywhere. Somewhere, sometime, some person records a basking box turtle as having a cloacal (~anal) temp of 34C. Now, one care guide after another gets ahold of and publishes this arbitrary single temp measurement and now tons of the country's pet shoppers are convinced that box turtles need a basking spot measuring 34C. Why should we assume that a local body temp should equal the provided basking temp? Also figure, that temp was taken from one animal at one time with no history and little context given. See the problem?
I think advice given on forums is often more usable, since the setting is interactive and readers of the advice have (presumably?) a greater ability to take it or leave it. Meaning, anyone who doesn't like my indirect wordiness can skip over every post with my screen name attatched and instead read quick-remedy-style posts. Much forum advice given is similar in nature to care guides - either regurgitated in turn from such sources or extrapolated from a writer's individual animals. The writer's animals that are providing information for a potential solution to someone else's animal's problem are themselves out of context, since they are not the someone else's animals and are not in that someone else's setup. Thus, the person with the initial problem now has a new problem - that of applied interpretation.
The reason I don't discuss what the animals I maintain do is because they live outdoors in East Baton Rouge Parish, LA at present. It was almost ninety degrees in some patches of the enclosure today. What were the hottest patches outside in WA measuring? See? It's more complex to figure out what far-away animals' behaviors mean compared to yours, especially when you're comparing outside animals to inside animals, which are subject to restricted spaces and the influences of air-conditioning and/or dry heating, forced humidity ranges, and often erratic photoperiods.
To give you a more digestable version of all the above hullaballoo, go with the smartsie-fartsie-seeming physiology and behavior basics, then you can tackle your own problems with applied common sense. That's almost always easier than calculating what someone else's results might mean with regards to your animal. This was all just to get you thinking. I understand that this is over just one pet animal, but, you seem to ask more curiosity-driven questions than does the average "unplanned" box turtle owner. So, you get more length here than you might have bargained for. Incedentally, I think cats are good pets, too, as none of the turtle species I maintain make biscuits or purr. All the best.
, but rather just what has proved successful in my direct experience (~25 years with the same two box turtles, an ornata and a c. triunguis). Folks are welcome to take it or leave it.
