Owning leopard tortoises: a personal journey and considerations for responsible pet ownership / Noor Azli Affendy Lee

At the tail end of 2020, I wanted to have additional new exotic pets at home. At that time, I had Maine Coon cats, Bengal cats and fennec foxes and was thinking of getting a pair of Land tortoises. There are a few important criteria that I look into when I want to own a land tortoise: shell pattern, price, and how big it can grow. There are many land tortoises that have beautiful-looking shells, among them are the radiated tortoise, the Indian star tortoise, the Hermann’s tortoise, and the Leopard tortoise. When it comes to pricing, the leopard tortoise is the cheapest and easily available as compared to the aforementioned ones. Even though there is another land tortoise known as the African spurred tortoise or the sulcata tortoise that is cheaper and widely available than the leopard tortoise in the Malaysian market, the fact that the former’s shell is not as remarkable, and the size differences between the two made me choose the latter.