Ugh, tode, you've made me feel really ill. Even if I didn't have Plod, I still can't bear the thought of try to eat a tortoise. Trying to break into the shell? And all that horrid wrinkly-old-man skin? Makes me quite queasy. You recipe skips right over the nasty bit to "cut meat into two inch pieces..."
<- closest I could find to "sick"
Yes, temp does fluctuate in the conservatory wildly. If it's sunny, it gets *very* hot as it gets the sun all day. Then he is mooching about. But, it's never frosty in there (it's a proper brick-built conservatory with double glazing) and he is in a (furry!) cat bed, inside a cat basket with his blanket (!) over it, off the floor, with a week's worth of newspapers to ferret about in - he can't get that cold, can he? We do have one of those oil heaters in there but we never use it as we simply don't go in there when it's too chilly. But I can put that on low to keep the chill off at nights if it would help?
And Spana - that's what I thought "Oh, he's survived 18 years with this routine, so MIL must have been doing something right". Then I read on one of the tortoise sites that, actually, it can take years for a tortoise to succumb to a routine that's wrong for him and that, rather than surviving for 18 years, the way the website put it was that the tortoise is slowly dying over those years! Can you imagine how bad I felt when I read that? Even though I'd only been looking after him for about six weeks of those 18 years!
Here we go, this is one of the things I read that worried me:
"People think that a tortoise will acclimatise if they put it in their garden - nothing could be farther from the truth. The tortoise may exist, miserably for many years but it will not thrive and, eventually, it will die prematurely from malnutrition. It will never, ever acclimatise."From slowcoach.org (good name!).
And the MIL is one of those women where it's her way or the highway. If I tried to tell her she'd been doing it wrong, she'd talk my head off!
Anyway, big hugey thanks to Spana and everyone who has helped in the care of Plod.