Tortoise stress

[cattykins]

Suddenly, my tortoise habitat exploded in popularity, and the tortoises got really stressed. The tortoises being stressed attracted protesters, who will not leave until the tortoises are no longer stressed. The problem is that the protesters constantly yelling is stressing the tortoises, so they are basically stuck being permanently stressed. How do I fix this?

[audiolady]

Pause to have time to think. Make a quick timeout spot for protesters, like I do. A ticket gate with one square of path INSIDE the enclosure works best, even tho I HAVE floated the ticket gate/path before, too.
That gets rid of protesters.
Do not Disturb signs, and screening plant enrichment also help. Do you have one way glass? That helps.

[cattykins]

a bit late, but ill keep this in mind. what i did was just store away some of the tortoises to reduce the appeal and then place a handful of plants and rocks for the tortoises to hide behind. once the remaining tortoises were no longer stressed, i reintroduced the tortoises i removed from the habitat earlier, and everything balanced out.

[grampers62]

It sounds like you did the optimum thing to get past that little moment. Good work thinking it through.

[HazelBee95]

I really wish you could sic security after protestors. You can eject pretty much anyone else from the zoo but not protestors? Whack.

[.]

For small animals that stress easily always use one way glass, they wont get stressed then, if you give them places to hide behind your guests will see them much less

[cattykins]

Originally posted by ThousandHellosAndGoodbyes:

For small animals that stress easily always use one way glass, they wont get stressed then, if you give them places to hide behind your guests will see them much less

yea, i dont use one way glass because they're categorized as normal stress level

[HazelBee95]

Originally posted by ThousandHellosAndGoodbyes:

For small animals that stress easily always use one way glass, they wont get stressed then, if you give them places to hide behind your guests will see them much less

Tortoises are especially bad because they move so slow. I had an aardvark exhibit that people were able to walk into to interact with the aardvarks and it was just fine because when the animals were stressed they would just retreat to their burrow out of reach of people. Tortoises move too slow tho so when they get stressed and start to retreat, their welfare drops all the way to zero before they make it to safety.

[Zeesha]

Something that can help with the super shy is to build ground over them and then (either rocks or walls) do spacing (like blank wall then window glass) one-way glass. Have found that the "chatter" of guests spikes their shyness and for some reason if they are in a "cave" like that, it stops.

Usually do the square terrain tool over the habitat at it's widest and thin setting to cover the habitat (push the walls as needed in) and then build up to it with rocks or construction walls.