Pancake didn't have a name when we first heard about her.
She was simply a Horsfield's tortoise that had been removed from her enclosure at Shirley Aquatics and placed into quarantine. The other tortoises had been walking over her because she had become virtually immobile, so separating her was absolutely the right thing to do.
And there she stayed.
For eight weeks.
Food was provided. Water was provided. Pancake remained in quarantine, but whatever was happening to her wasn't getting better. Eventually, a concerned member of staff contacted us because they believed something needed to be done.
Penny went to collect her.
By the time Pancake arrived with us, this wasn't a case of a tortoise being a little quiet. She was profoundly lethargic and showed significant muscle weakness. Both eyes were swollen completely shut and her responses to handling and her surroundings were minimal.
Then we put her on the scales.
608 grams.
Based on her dimensions and comparison with healthy animals of similar size, our assessment put her estimated healthy weight at somewhere around 850 grams. That put her approximately 29% below the body weight we would have expected.
Something was very wrong.
And whatever was wrong hadn't happened overnight.
First things first
Our immediate priority wasn't food.
It was stabilisation.
Pancake's first stop was a shallow warm bath containing an electrolyte solution. Electrolytes are minerals carrying an electrical charge—including sodium, potassium and chloride—and they are fundamental to maintaining fluid balance and normal nerve, muscle and cellular function.
They're not some magical recovery potion. But when an animal has apparently been eating and drinking poorly for an extended period, hydration becomes an important part of supportive care. Dehydration in reptiles is commonly associated with prolonged anorexia or inadequate access to usable water, and veterinary reptile medicine recognises fluid therapy as an important part of stabilising debilitated animals. Warm shallow bathing can also provide a tortoise that is still capable of drinking with an opportunity to do so.
Once we'd finished bathing her, Pancake was placed into a small quarantine enclosure.
Warmth.
UV.
Quiet.
And very little else.
At that point we weren't interested in creating the world's most beautiful tortoise enclosure. We needed an environment where her temperature could be maintained appropriately, where everything she needed was immediately accessible and, perhaps most importantly, where we could watch her.
For a severely compromised reptile, temperature isn't simply about making the animal comfortable. Reptilian physiology is temperature dependent, and supportive care relies upon maintaining an animal within an appropriate thermal range. Even oral fluid absorption and gastrointestinal activity are affected by temperature.
So we got her warm.
And left her alone.
A little help
The following morning, Pancake hadn't miraculously transformed into a healthy tortoise.
We hadn't expected her to.
She had apparently been deteriorating for weeks. We weren't going to undo that in twelve hours.
Given the particular combination of signs in front of us, we administered 5 ml of a solution containing electrolytes, calcium and vitamin A using a small feeding tube. Assisted oral fluids and nutritional support are established components of supportive care in debilitated chelonians, but this is important: what we gave Pancake was an intervention for Pancake, not a treatment recipe for sick tortoises. The causes of lethargy, weakness, anorexia and swollen eyes are numerous, and inappropriate supplementation—particularly vitamin A—can itself cause harm.
I've used this form of supportive intervention over many years when presented with a very particular combination of circumstances, but experience doesn't turn one animal's treatment into universal medicine.
Different animal. Different history. Different problem.
Different treatment.
Once we'd finished, Pancake went back into the warmth.
And again...
We waited.
Several hours later, Scratch and Shelby were already outside in the garden.
They were doing what healthy tortoises tend to do remarkably well when presented with something edible.
Eating furiously.
So we took Pancake outside.
We placed her on the lawn with them, introduced a pile of tortoise snacks and sat down nearby.
There was nothing else we could do at that moment.
For the first time since she had arrived, the next decision belonged to Pancake.
And we watched.
Still watching...
And we watched. And watched. And watched some more. You know those ridiculous cartoon time cards where several geological periods appear to pass while someone announces the passage of time in an increasingly terrible French accent? It felt a little like that.
Pancake did absolutely nothing.
Considering that doing absolutely nothing was one of the reasons she was currently sitting in our garden, this wasn't particularly encouraging. But after a couple of hours, something happened. She moved. Not much at first, but enough to make both of us pay considerably more attention.
Scratch happened to be passing on one of his mysterious "I'm definitely going somewhere and possibly winning an imaginary race" expeditions, and Pancake made her way towards him. She sniffed him, then wandered over to Shelby and did the same. For the first time since we'd collected her, Pancake wasn't simply responding to something we were doing to her. She was investigating something for herself.
Then she found the dandelions.
A relatively untouched patch of fresh growth had appeared on the lawn and Pancake settled herself beside it, lowered her head and started snipping away at the leaves with that sharp little tortoise beak. One disappeared, then another, then another. For around twenty minutes she grazed. No feeding tube, no food pushed towards her face and no encouragement from us. Pancake had made the decision to eat.
When she'd apparently had enough, she stopped, sat in the sunshine and went to sleep. Eventually she woke again, moved herself into the shade beneath the buddleia and promptly went back to sleep.
We couldn't have been happier.
To anyone else watching, we'd just spent several hours sitting in a garden getting ridiculously excited because a tortoise had eaten some weeds and then fallen asleep twice. To us, Pancake had just demonstrated something considerably more important. She had interacted with Scratch and Shelby, our two slightly simple leopard tortoises from almost the opposite end of the behavioural spectrum. She had eaten voluntarily, moved between sun and shade and thermoregulated under her own power.
None of these were remarkable behaviours. They were ordinary tortoise behaviours. But after eight weeks in which Pancake had apparently done very little at all, ordinary was bloody wonderful.
It didn't mean she was fixed, nor did it mean whatever had caused her deterioration had suddenly disappeared. We certainly weren't going to stop watching her. But for the first time since we'd met her, Pancake was making decisions for herself.
It was a promising start.
I'm Still Standing
Pancake spent the next week doing something we hadn't seen much evidence of before she came to us.
Being a tortoise.
She fed. She tottered around the garden with Scratch and Shelby. She slept, basked, moved between sun and shade and generally began participating in the world around her again. On one particularly memorable occasion she even managed to nearly fall asleep in the bath, which is either a sign of complete relaxation or Pancake discovering that warm baths are considerably better when nobody expects you to do anything afterwards.
Most importantly, she ate.
And ate.
And then ate some more.
Dandelions, weeds, grasses and whatever suitable tortoise food we could put in front of her disappeared with an enthusiasm completely at odds with the animal we'd collected only days earlier. After watching a 608-gram tortoise sit almost completely unresponsive, seeing Pancake wandering around the garden actively looking for something else to eat was immensely satisfying.
Her weight began to reflect that change. She climbed from 608 grams to 657 grams before dropping back to 624 grams. On paper, losing 33 grams from one weigh-in to the next might look concerning, but numbers without context can be wonderfully misleading. Pancake had become considerably more active and, somewhere between those two measurements, produced an impressively large poo. Given that she was eating, moving, thermoregulating and behaving normally, I wasn't particularly concerned by the fluctuation.
Weight is useful. The animal attached to the number is more useful.
By the end of that first week, Pancake was behaving much more like an active female Horsfield's tortoise should. She was still slightly unstable on her feet and there was clearly strength left to regain, but she wasn't the virtually immobile animal Penny had collected.
She was walking.
She was choosing where she wanted to be.
She was eating everything she could get that little beak around.
And she was still standing.
For Pancake, that would do nicely.
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