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I am doing a project for school and we are supposed to gradually teach one of our pets a trick. I chose to use my turtles in the experiment because it seems like a lot of people will use cats and dogs, so a turtle would be interesting.

Have you ever taught one of your turtles a trick?

How would you go about teaching the turtle? And what kind of trick would you teach them?

I have taught mine to climb up onto their dock to grab food that is messy (like canned fish or fruit) and because of that the ywo older ones will follow my finger around on the floor

Turtles are too instinctive driven but I guess it depends on what you would classify as a trick. You can have them follow you or eat something, but they will be pretty limited.

Read this article and watch the video, the video is pretty amazing and shows what his turtle can do.

http://arbroath.blogspot.com/2007/12/ma ... s-pet.html

Um... probably, but, you would need a lot of patience. I know that one person on here, when she holds out her hands, her turtle will walk right into her hands. The other turtle greets her when she comes home!

I sometimes think of turtles as being more observant, and "monkey see, monkey do". If you do the same thing in front of a turtle on a regular basis, they sometimes will copy it. For a while, I had my younger turtle, Typhoon in the habit of cocking her head to the side when she greeted me at the tank wall. Another time, they got scared of me when I approached the tank with sunglasses on, so, I kept taking them off and putting them back on until they stopped being scared. It's like, the second the glasses were on, I was a totally different person even though I had not moved beyond putting on the glasses. We have to remember their brains are not as huge as a ours, but their eyesight is very distinctive, so, I am going to guess they did not recognize the human with the giant black eyes!

BTW, Fabio, the contestant on Top Chef All Stars, puts a cat leash harness on his turtle and takes her for WALKS outdoors. I think this is an AWESOME way to interact with your turtle(s).

steve wrote:Turtles are too instinctive driven but I guess it depends on what you would classify as a trick. You can have them follow you or eat something, but they will be pretty limited.

Well, all pets are different. There are tricks that cats can learn, like tight-rope walking, that dogs physically are incapable of doing. Same with climbing ladders, cats can do it, but dogs can't because their hip joints are designed for running, not climbing. In addition to that, dogs are eager to please people and cats don't give a crap about how pleased we are.

I probably can't teach my cat to tilt his head to the side when we stare at each other, yet, I can teach my turtle to do it. I think this is do to the fact that turtles don't "hear", so, vocal commands are out of the question. They observe their world through sight because they don't have the option to "hear" it. Basically, cats have five senses that are moderately sensitive to the world around them (sort of, their hearing and eyesight is very specifically designed), while turtles have one sense that is most highly developed and probably part of their survival in the wild.

theartbook35 wrote:Um... probably, but, you would need a lot of patience. I know that one person on here, when she holds out her hands, her turtle will walk right into her hands. The other turtle greets her when she comes home!

hmmm...I got the feeling you are talking about me

@Emma yes,you need patience and a lot of LOVE to teach them. If you have 2 turtles,the other will soon copy the one you have taught.
Here is the video of Kame and the things she had learned. http://kamekroten.wordpress.com/2010/10 ... loving-me/