Twenty years ago, I put my tortoise in a fridge.
It sounds like the opening line of a confession rather than an article on reptile husbandry, but at the time it seemed perfectly sensible. Every care sheet, experienced keeper and breeder I spoke to agreed that a healthy Horsfield tortoise should brumate, so I spent weeks preparing my three-year-old tortoise, Timmy, for what was supposed to be one of the most natural parts of his life.
Food was gradually withdrawn.
Temperatures slowly reduced.
Daily baths encouraged him to empty his digestive tract.
Finally, after what felt like an eternity of preparation, I placed him into a dedicated fridge, closed the door and spent the next eight weeks wondering whether I'd completely lost my mind.
Every time I opened that fridge my heart tried to escape my chest and hide in a cupboard.
When the day finally came to wake him, things didn't improve. Timmy was slow to respond and it took almost two weeks before he behaved like the tortoise I'd put to sleep. By every accepted measure, the brumation had been a success.
Mine nearly wasn't.
The stress of those eight weeks had aged me considerably.
For years, I assumed that was simply part of responsible tortoise keeping.
Then one conversation changed everything.
A fellow keeper lost a healthy Hermann's tortoise during brumation. When I asked what had happened, the reply came back with remarkable confidence.
"It happens in the wild."
I remember standing there thinking something that was probably too impolite to say out loud.
They're not in the wild, Kevin.
Well... Kevin wasn't actually called Kevin.
But he knows who he is.
And that single conversation forced me to ask a question I'd somehow managed to avoid for the previous twenty years.
Not...
"Do tortoises brumate?"
We already know they do.
The real question was this.
When we remove the conditions that made brumation necessary in the first place... should we automatically preserve the behaviour?
Winter Isn't a Choice
By this point I'd started asking a question that, looking back, I probably should have asked twenty years earlier.
Why do wild tortoises brumate in the first place?
It's surprisingly easy to assume they do it because they need a long winter's sleep in the same way we assume a camel needs a hump or a giraffe needs a long neck.
That's not really how evolution works.
Brumation isn't a benefit in itself.
It's a survival strategy.
Across much of the natural range of Mediterranean tortoises, winter brings two problems. The first is temperature. Testudo species are ectotherms, relying on external heat to regulate their body temperature. As temperatures fall, digestion slows, movement becomes increasingly difficult and, eventually, remaining active simply costs more energy than it returns.
The second problem is food.
The lush spring meadows and flowering weeds that sustain tortoises through much of the year disappear as winter takes hold. Even if a tortoise could remain active, there may be little worth eating. Staying awake in those conditions means burning precious energy while finding very little to replace it.
Evolution found a simpler solution.
Slow everything down.
During brumation, a tortoise's metabolism falls dramatically. Heart rate slows, breathing becomes infrequent and energy demands are reduced to a tiny fraction of what they are during the active season. Rather than spending winter searching for food that isn't there, the animal survives on the reserves it built during the warmer months before emerging when conditions once again favour activity.
It's an elegant solution.
Not because brumation is good.
Because winter is hard.
Necessity, Not Preference
That distinction became increasingly important the more I thought about it.
Wild tortoises don't brumate because they enjoy it.
They don't disappear underground every autumn because they've read the care sheet or because a calendar says October has arrived.
They brumate because the environment leaves them with very few alternatives.
Food declines.
Temperatures fall.
Digestion becomes inefficient.
Remaining active simply becomes a poor survival strategy.
Brumation isn't the goal.
Spring is.
Once I'd looked at it that way, I realised I'd been asking entirely the wrong question for years.
Not...
"Should tortoises brumate?"
But...
"What problem is brumation actually solving?"
Because if we understand the problem...
Only then can we begin discussing whether that same problem still exists in captivity.
What Changed My Mind
Once I'd started looking at brumation through the lens of natural history, another question quietly followed.
What happens when we remove the very conditions that made brumation necessary?
Twenty years ago, that wasn't an easy question to answer. Heating was basic, UVB technology was in its infancy and our understanding of reptile nutrition was nowhere near where it is today. If you wanted to recreate a Mediterranean summer in the middle of a British winter, you were fighting an uphill battle.
Today, things look rather different.
Modern lighting provides biologically appropriate levels of UVB. Thermostatically controlled heating allows us to create stable thermal gradients throughout the year, while decades of nutritional research have transformed the way we feed Mediterranean tortoises. We understand far more about fibre, calcium, photoperiod and seasonal husbandry than we did when Timmy first disappeared into that little beer fridge.
In other words...
The environment has changed.
That matters.
Because if brumation evolved as a solution to cold temperatures, poor digestion and seasonal food shortages, we have to ask whether those same pressures still exist inside a well-managed captive enclosure.
For some keepers, the answer is still yes.
For me...
It gradually became no.
Winter Still Arrives
That doesn't mean my tortoises spend December pretending it's August.
Far from it.
Winter still changes everything.
Lighting periods become shorter. Feeding naturally slows. Fresh weeds become less abundant and the diet shifts towards dried flowers, grasses and hay. Activity drops noticeably, basking periods become shorter and the entire collection settles into a slower rhythm.
The tortoises know it's winter.
They don't need a calendar to tell them.
They don't need me to tell them either.
Seasonal behaviour still happens.
It just happens above ground.
That observation became increasingly difficult to ignore.
Our Horsfield and Hermann's tortoises remained in excellent body condition. They fed well, bred readily and displayed perfectly normal seasonal changes in behaviour without ever disappearing into a fridge for three months.
The more years passed...
The harder it became to justify putting them there.
A Question Rather Than An Answer
This is the point where people often expect me to tell them that nobody should ever brumate a tortoise.
That isn't what I'm saying.
Plenty of experienced keepers successfully brumate healthy tortoises every year. Done correctly, it can be a safe and entirely appropriate management technique.
What I'm questioning is something slightly different.
Whether we've become so accustomed to brumating captive tortoises that we've stopped asking why we're doing it.
Tradition is a wonderful thing.
Until it stops us asking better questions.
If an animal is healthy...
Maintains natural seasonal rhythms...
Receives appropriate lighting, heating and nutrition...
And continues to breed successfully...
Is brumation still solving a problem?
Or are we preserving a behaviour simply because that's how it's always been done?
I'm not convinced the answer is as straightforward as many of us once believed.
So... Should You Brumate Your Tortoise?
People often ask me whether I think tortoises should be brumated.
After twenty years of keeping them, my answer is probably more frustrating than they were hoping for.
It depends.
It depends on the species.
It depends on the individual.
It depends on its health.
It depends on the environment you've created.
And, perhaps more than anything else...
It depends on why you're doing it.
If you're brumating a healthy Testudo because you've carefully weighed the evidence, understand the risks, know the natural history of the species and believe it's the right decision for that individual, I can completely respect that.
If you're doing it simply because somebody once told you "that's what tortoises do," I think it's worth asking a few more questions first.
Because natural history doesn't tell us what we must do.
It tells us why animals evolved to do it.
There's an important difference.
Wild Mediterranean tortoises don't disappear underground because they've decided a long winter's sleep sounds rather pleasant.
They do it because the environment has left them with almost no alternative.
Food disappears.
Temperatures fall.
Their physiology changes.
Brumation isn't the objective.
Survival is.
Captivity gives us opportunities that evolution never had.
We can provide heat.
We can provide light.
We can provide food.
We can maintain hydration.
We can monitor body condition.
We can intervene when something goes wrong.
The question, therefore, isn't whether wild tortoises evolved to brumate.
They clearly did.
The question is whether we've already removed the environmental pressures that made brumation necessary in the first place.
Twenty years ago I put a little Horsfield tortoise called Timmy into a fridge because I believed that was simply what responsible keepers did.
Today, our Horsfield and Hermann's tortoises remain active throughout winter under carefully managed lighting, heating and seasonal husbandry. They maintain excellent body condition, breed successfully and continue to show the subtle seasonal changes I'd expect from healthy Testudo tortoises.
Could I brumate them?
Of course.
Do I feel I need to?
Personally...
No.
That doesn't make my approach the only correct one.
It simply reflects where twenty years of observation have led me.
Perhaps that's the biggest lesson Timmy ever taught me.
Good husbandry isn't about copying nature.
It's about understanding it.
Sometimes that means recreating exactly what happens in the wild.
Sometimes it means recognising that we've already solved the problem evolution was trying to overcome.
And that, I think, is the question every keeper should ask before they put a tortoise in a fridge
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