Giant tortoises given speed training so they can be put to bed quicker at night

Three giant tortoises are being put through their paces by trainers at Twycross Zoo in Leicestershire. Normally, Speedy, aged 70, Tim, 40 and Shelly, 30, plod along at less than one mile per hour. However, the zoo has built an extended outdoor pen for the animals and keepers were concerned the lumbering leviathans would take too long to be put to bed at the end of the day.



To help the tortoises speed up a bit, the keepers have devised a training programme using food and other encouragements which would concentrate the creatures' minds on the job at hand. The giants are Aldabra tortoises, which originate in the Seychelles and they can weigh up to 250kg (more than 550lb), so the keepers could not use muscle power to shift them and had to come up with an imaginative way to encourage the giants to get a move on.

Keeper Kris Hern said: "We began the training roughly six months ahead of the extension area being completed, using a target and the tortoises' favourite foods. We held the target a few centimetres in front of them and when they touched it with their nose we said 'good' and fed them a piece of food. We then moved the target further away and repeated the process which encouraged them to move along at a steady pace. As the behaviour got stronger, we gradually increased the distance between them and the target."


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Fellow keeper Ryan Berry said: "We knew the outdoor extension would prove more challenging for us to bring the tortoises indoors for the evening. They are very slow moving animals, plodding along at less than one mile per hour." He said training the tortoises was "a very slow process". "We anticipate the training will carry on throughout the summer until our tortoises really get the hang of it," he said. "Despite his name, Speedy is always the last one in at the end of the day."