Mount Dora officials
want to know one thing: What was a tortoise native to the Sahara Desert doing on the streets of their city recently?
What was a tortoise native to the Sahara Desert doing in the streets of Mount Dora? City officials would like to know.
An African spurred tortoise was sighted roaming the roads twice last week before a resident nabbed it. Now it’s settling into its new digs at the CARE Foundation, an exotic animal-rescue facility in Apopka, next to another African tortoise — “a great example of how people buy an animal at a pet store without really knowing what they are getting into,” according to the center’s website.
“Our investigators at animal control and Mount Dora Police are just looking at lost-andfound sites and Facebook” trying to find the owner, city spokeswoman Lisa McDonald said. “We just don’t know.”
The male tortoise joined a cadre of other tigers, bears, monkeys and reptiles at the center for animals not native to Florida. Often not dangerous, exotic animals in Florida may make for cool but difficult-tocontrol pets.
Already, one woman contacted the nonprofit looking for her lost African tortoise, but “she was looking for a female, so it wasn’t hers,” said Christin Burford, director and founder at the center that started in 1996.
Now, the unnamed guest will live out his life munching vegetables, engaging in slow-motion battles for dominance with the center’s other African spurred tortoise, Goliath, who was sold for drugs by his owner.
“They try to flip each other over for dominance,” Burford said. “I was standing there taking video a little while, and the little one was pushing back. I was hoping Goliath would take to him.”
Since the reptile’s arrival at the 10-acre center, Burford said she’s received several reports of tortoise sightings and other lost tortoises — including two others in Mount Dora.
It’s not a pet that she recommends. Also called the sulcata tortoise, they can live past 100 years and are the third largest of their species, weighing more than 200 pounds.
“For whatever reason, you don’t need a permit, and a lot of pet stores carry these cute little babies, and they don’t tell people how big they get and how long they live for,” Burford said.
It’s not the only strange thing to break free in Florida, which is “conducive to any tropical animal.”
A 2-foot suphan cobra that escaped in Ocala this spring is still at large. Rhesus monkeys are sometimes sighted roaming Marion County after being brought into Silver Springs State Park, then privately owned, in the 1930s. And pythons plague the Everglades, either released intentionally or after Hurricane Andrew in 1992.
The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission issued new rules in the late 1990s concerning the imported African tortoises to prevent the spread of disease.
“If they come from Africa, there’s potential for them carrying a parasite,” said Rick Brown, an FWC inspector. “It can wipe out an entire white-tailed deer herd.”
Importers are required to show a clean bill of health for their tortoise and sellers require a permit, but not owners. Residents can be required to have digging barriers in their backyard for the “little bulldozers” and can face a possible misdemeanor citation if they do not, Brown said.
Still, he knows how people in Mount Dora feel.
“Most of the time I get a sighting, by the time, I show up they’re gone,” Brown said. “Even if they don’t move very fast.”