Injuries prove too much for ‘Highway Pete’
Tortoise that was struck by vehicle in San Andreas dies
Highway Pete, a 95-pound tortoise that was struck by a car in August outside of San Andreas and sustained shell cracks and internal injuries, has been put down after more than a month of efforts by veterinarians, donors and volunteers to save his life.
“It is with a very heavy heart that I am writing this,” Brandon Milo, with Milo’s Misfits Reptile Rescue in San Andreas, said in a social media fundraising post Thursday evening. “Pete’s CT scan happened earlier today. The prognosis was not good. I won’t go into details but there was too much damage done to continue treating him.”
Highway Pete was doing OK on Wednesday this week but he’s needed more medical care because he wasn’t eating, Milo said. The tortoise was at a UC Davis veterinary facility for a computerized tomography scan on Thursday.
“My number one goal throughout this was Pete
and what was best for him,” Milo said. “It’s a decision no one ever wants to make, but with no guaranteed positive outcome and a long road of pain ahead, I made that decision. I am happy he is no longer in pain and obviously very sad he’s no longer with us.”
A post Milo made on Monday included photos of people trying to care for Highway Pete in a room, Highway Pete being transported on a fenced cart, and veterinary invoices and bills, totaling more than $5,000. At that point, the fundraiser was for Highway Pete’s medical expenses. As of Friday, the post had been renamed for Highway Pete’s UC Davis and funeral expenses.
In early August, a team of veterinarian professionals in Lodi worked to save the seriously injured tortoise that came to be known as Highway Pete. The tortoise was struck by a car on Mountain Ranch Road outside San Andreas on Aug. 4.
Milo lives less than two minutes from the Cal Fire Tuolumne-calaveras Unit headquarters at 785 Mountain
Ranch Road in San Andreas, and he got a call to come collect the injured tortoise.
“I went straight there and it was clear he was severely injured,” Milo said in August. “It was a flip of a coin whether he would make it or not. The condition of its shell, the amount of damage it sustained from impact with the car, the amount of blood loss. All this exceeded my abilities to treat his injuries.”
Milo has run Milo’s Misfits Reptile Rescue for two years and estimates he’s rescued 30 tortoises in that time. Milo said that he and Cal Fire personnel agreed to call the injured tortoise Highway Pete.
“This is by far the worst injuries I’ve seen for a tortoise,” Milo said in August. “It looked like five full-length cracks, from one end of the shell to the other. The cracks looked like a California road map.”
Vet technicians led by Dr. Richard Turner at Arbor Pet Clinic in Lodi worked with tools including adhesive, fabric, Phillips-head screws, and a hair dryer to reconstruct the injured tortoise’s shell, which cracked in multiple places.
Milo said in August he was confident Highway Pete was an escaped pet tortoise called a sulcata, an African spurred tortoise, not a wild tortoise, and not any tortoise species that is native to any part of the Golden State.
Sulcata is a common name for the African spurred tortoise species, Milo said. Sulcatas are originally from the southern edge of the Sahara Desert that stretches across North Africa north of the equator.
Scientists say the sulcata tortoise is the largest mainland tortoise species in the world and third-largest tortoise in the world. They are nowhere near as large as tortoises from Galapagos and Aldabra in the Pacific and Indian oceans, where they can range from 790 to more than 875 pounds.
Sulcata hatchlings are tiny, 2 to 3 inches long. They can grow to weigh more than 200 pounds and live as long as 70 human years. One of the tortoises native to the Golden State is called the Agassiz desert tortoise, found in the Mojave and Colorado/ Sonoran deserts of Southern California.