Murphy, my Russian Tortoise
Most of my cats are unaware that there is another creature in the house, one who has been here longer than they have. Her name is Murphy, and she is a Russian Tortoise.
Murphy lives in a big wooden box in my guest room. My father built her habitat — it comes complete with a basking platform and a “cave” where she can go hide. The top screen opens from either end, making it easy to clean, and there’s a back door leading to the cave. Sometimes, when I feel Murphy needs to crawl around the guest room, having Indiana-Jones style adventures, I open this back door for her. She can come and go that way.
On these occasions, I also close the guest room door. Murphy doesn’t want to play with the cats. They have claws.
I have plans to build her a fabulous outdoor enclosure this spring. She’ll have so many adventures! I’ll stand outside the enclosure and watch her, humming the Indiana Jones theme song so that her adventure will be complete. Will Murphy appreciate this? Probably not. I have actually spent a good deal of time over the years following her around, humming this tune.
Murphy was an impulse buy I made nearly ten years ago at Petco. Someone should have talked me out of it. In fact, Petco should make you sit with a “pet advocate” before you purchase an animal from them. Of course, they would have to find someone who actually knows something about the animals they sell. Everything they told me about Murphy was wrong.
Murphy’s life expectancy is 50 years. I was 37 when I bought her. You see the issue, right? Fortunately, I have a nephew who is willing to take her if I go first.
Shortly after I bought Murphy, I mentioned her to a man I met in a class I was taking. He thought it was really weird that a woman without kids would buy a turtle. Apparently, that’s an animal people only buy for their children.
I think it would be inadvisable to buy a child a pet that was going to live for 50 years. How on earth would you know whether they were going to want or have room in their life for a turtle twenty or thirty years down the road? They would have to accommodate that pet deep into middle age. Consider how many dogs and cats get left behind with parents when children go off to college, never to be reunited with their true “owner.” Long-lived pets are for adults who are settled, who have a fairly good idea of who they’re going to be and how they’re going to live for the next few decades.
Murphy has limited experience with children, but I’m sure she would hate them. They would stress her out. Murphy basically has two moods: stressed and curious. When she’s stressed, she huffs like a teenager, burrows into her timothy hay and hides. Being handled by inexpert little hands would probably do that to her.
It would be like the day, long ago, that I took her to work with me. It was a teacher in-service day — there were no students on campus. Just adults. Grownup people. People who should know how to handle a turtle without stressing her.
The guidance staff asked if they could babysit Murphy for a while. I trusted them.
They made a paper bikini, taped it to her shell, and did a photoshoot. The resulting PowerPoint was emailed to the whole staff. Murphy’s response was exactly what mine would have been — she buried herself and hid for the next seven hours.
My guess is that a lot of turtles sold as pets end up getting rehomed — or worse, “set free.” Murphy would not make it outside. She would starve to death, surrounded by vegetation, wondering where her food bowl was and why the water didn’t taste like Dasani.
Recently, my newest cat Scooter discovered Murphy. She was clanking inside her habitat, and he went to investigate. Murphy tends to make a lot of noise — clanking her shell against the wall when she’s trying to burrow. Scooter spent a couple of days perched outside Murphy’s back door, listening. Then, one day, she emerged from her cave and climbed her staircase while he was on top of her box. He was fascinated. I’m sure he told the other cats about the strange climbing rock, and I’m sure they didn’t believe him. After all, they’ve lived with that box for years — they’ve never seen a creature in it.
Sweet Zombie actually got in the box recently. I was feeding Murphy when he came flying out of nowhere and landed right on top of her. He used her as a springboard to jump onto her basking platform. I was horrified. I pulled him out of the box and inspected Murphy to make sure she was okay. She was a bit grumpy, but unhurt. (If Murphy ever writes an autobiography, that would make a great a title: Grumpy, but Unhurt: The Life and Times of a Russian Tort).
I am taking great care to make sure Scooter never gets in the box with Murphy. There is no reason for them to meet. People are always suggesting I get pictures or videos of Murphy with my cats — as if that would be worth risking an injury to this creature I have a duty to protect for the rest of my life.
