Care of Aquatic Turtles As Pets

Video Transcript

Hi, I'm Tim Cole with Austin Reptile service and I've been keeping reptiles and amphibians for over forty years. We're here to talk about keeping turtles. In front of me is an outdoor pond set up with yellow belly sliders, Texas cooters and red eared sliders. We have a filter on this pond that helps keep the water clean. The sliders do get big and they do require outdoor ponds, they just don't make aquariums big enough for these turtles. Quite often the red eared sliders are sold as babies as turtle pets in a variety of pet stores or flea markets and to be honest with you, these don't make good pets. They get fairly large. This one is an adult female and it doesn't take them very long to get this big. You'll notice that the turtle will bite, these are not what I would call pets. Turtles are an animal that should be set up and left alone, they don't like to be handled. Doesn't matter what kind of turtle it is, they do not like to be handled, okay? Now the sliders are primarily herbivores so they're eating plants, when they're younger they'll eat insects and fish. So you can give them a varieties of foods. So I would encourage you to go with different species of turtles for pets, such as mud turtles, musk turtles, map turtles, painted turtles, they make much better pets because they don't get as big.

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