Discover and read the best of Twitter Threads about #EddieTheTortoise
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For #WorldSnakeDay, how about a snake story? It's also a birthday story. For my 50th birthday (ten years ago, ye gods), my middle son accompanied me for a day trip to the Mojave Desert and to the poppy fields in the Antelope Valley. We saw #Eddiethetortoise's wild cousins-- 
--provided welcome shade for some excellent horned lizard friends--
--then went on to the Antelope Valley for the California Poppy bloom. I had brought a point-and-shoot digital camera, but also the 4x5 large-format film camera I had at the time. Here's my son posed with it that day. He was a great photo assistant. The poppies were amazing and--
Before #Eddiethetortoise came into our lives, we had Bob. Here is his story (a thread):
This is a photo of Bob on the day we found him in the spring of 1994 (taken with my old Nikon film camera, needless to say). But his story actually starts about ten months earlier, in--
This is a photo of Bob on the day we found him in the spring of 1994 (taken with my old Nikon film camera, needless to say). But his story actually starts about ten months earlier, in--
--May of 1993. That's when we moved into our house. We were young, and both nervous and excited to own ten percent of our own home (the rest belonging, of course, to the bank). Jump forward to--
--January 17th, 1994, 4:30 a.m.: the Northridge Earthquake. It was not fun. It sounded like a freight train coming through the house - it literally threw me out of bed. Our zipcode sustained more damage than any besides that of the epicenter, Northridge. Our chimney--
Thread: As you enjoy this pic of #Eddiethetortoise pruning a rose, I want to tell you part of his story that I feel needs more context. After my original (pinned) tweet, many of you, rightfully, expressed sadness and/or anger about the neglect he suffered. And yes--
--Eddie did suffer. Nearly died, in fact. But there's more to the story than blame. When we moved into our house years ago, we learned that our next-door neighbors had a tortoise named Fast Eddie. The couple--
--was nice, and the wife especially was a self-described animal lover. She was also someone who, perhaps, felt that love more strongly than most. Maybe even obsessively. I remember the first time we met, she took a photo of--
Eddie is one of our desert tortoises. If you don’t push the door shut all the way, he will open it and come in. Eddie is probably over 50 years old, and ours is at least the third house in our neighborhood he’s lived at.
Desert tortoises are a protected species and cannot be taken from the wild as pets. But they live a long time, and a long time ago they were not protected - so many people you meet who grew up in Southern California either had one in their yard or knew someone who did.
Captive torts cannot be returned to the wild, both because captive animals can introduce diseases to wild populations and because captive animals would be unlikely to survive being put back in the wild.
