Dealing with the loss of a pet turtle?

Tommy Turtle is gone. There’s just no other way around that fact. We cleaned the koi pond a few weekends ago, putting in a new UV filter, and we just never saw him after that. In spite of the clearer, cleaner water.

Tommy was just a common pet store red-eared slider turtle, but we’d enjoyed his presence out in the fish pond through the last few years. We would marvel at his ability to survive the harsh Reno winters, submerged under three months of ice and yet come out in early April, on that rare warm day, looking bigger and better than he’d gone in the previous autumn.

Here’s the biggest worry. I’m afraid I’ll find his shell and slimy remains in the bottom of the pond when I least expect it. A pathetic turtle skeleton, flesh consumed by the other fish, in a frenzied first course of Suppa di Tortuga Fresca. Fish don’t seem to be very discriminating.

There was probably a moment of dull –witted surprise when either my fly-fishing wader clad husband stepped on his little pointed turtle head, or one of the decorative rocks came sliding down and cracked his carapace like a walnut at Thanksgiving.

I feel guilty. We probably should have captured him and brought him to safety first, but you could neither find nor catch the little bastard. He was quick indeed.

My question is: how long is an appropriate interval to wait before bonding with another turtle? What is the right period of mourning for a reptile?

A few years back, we’d bought a pond turtle (named ‘Oscar’ ) and come that first snowstorm we all panicked. He’ll be cold. He’ll think we’re cruel and irresponsible turtle owners! We tried making him some sort of shelter but that didn’t seem to work as he wasn’t very understanding about his own responsibility to get in the damn turtle condo. He didn’t want any part of it. So we brought him indoors and sequestered him in a large aquarium with a lamp, water, rock and food.

He died.

My then late 80-something year-old Mother, who was babysitting the assorted critters while we were out of town, buried Oscar in the backyard flower garden, wrapped in the double layered, quilted for extra strength embrace of Bounty paper towels and tucked securely into a SAS shoe box. Mom was born a ‘soddie’ on the Oklahoma prairie in 1917 and pet turtles don’t particularly upset her day …. alive or dead. She wanted to be able to tell us she’d done the right thing.

The following spring, we went to the pond store on a bright and warm spring day to buy plants and there were turtles! Lots of ‘em, energetically climbing over each others backs, attempting the scramble to freedom up the side of a plastic Sponge Bob Square Pants wadding pool. “Jeeze, look at them, Ron … it’s like they all want to go home with somebody,” I said. He just looked at me with a jaundiced eye, like “ oh, no here we go again.”

Weakening, we picked one out and the kid minding the store told us not to make the same mistake: “leave the damn turtle in the pond. Quit treating it like a hamster.” This kid was a seasoned, foul mouthed pro. He had witnessed needless death at the hands of nimrod turtle owners before.

So we left him in the pond. And named him Tommy, after a friend. We thought they had about the same level of smarts. Sweet, but just not the sharpest knife in the drawer. That’s how knives become dull, you know – leaving them in the drawer instead of a knife block. I digress. We left the new Turtle in the pond, not the kitchen drawer. That was four years ago.

I feel like a family failure. My late grandmother, who owned the Tropical Pet and Garden store in Miami for more than 40 years, had a red eared slider turtle named Oscar. She trained him to come when summoned and snatch frozen hamburger balls from her (bet you didn’t know hamburgers had balls …. Rimshot). Oscar number one eventually got so big that she donated him to the Crandon Park Zoo in Miami. I should have been able to follow in her footsteps.

Now, Autumn is fast approaching with winter on its heels. I dread that warm day in Spring when I’ll see that wiggling mass of dim-witted turtles at the pond supply store and have to make a decision.

Perhaps a hamster would be best, but on second thought, I have a Jack Russell Terrier and a cat. That would be a disturbing sight.

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