h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

My daughter El's tortoise is about 3 years old. She should live until she's about 70, so she's young. She doesn't have a name, and is called 'the tortoise'. Perhaps in a few years' time she'll get a name.

Our three guinea pigs, who are sisters, are about 7 months old, which in guinea pig terms makes them young adults.

The tortoise has never really noticed the guinea pigs before, so I was highly surprised by her behaviour yesterday. She was stamping about in her cage making lots of noise which is a sure sign that she's warmed up and ready to do some slow marching around the kitchen. I brought her to the kitchen and let her loose. She marched over in the direction of the guinea pigs' box in the corner. They came out to see what this strange creature was and sniffed at her. The tortoise then proceeded to chase them around the kitchen for about 40 minutes, running up to them with her mouth open wide and snapping at them. They're twice her size! Of couse, the piggies are far to fast for her - there's no way she could ever catch one, but she is very determined.

It was hilarious.

Eventually she cooled down and got tired, and went to sleep in the corner, so I put her back under her heat lamp and that was the end of her exercise for the day. The guinea pigs weren't too traumatised - they forgot about her after a minute or so.

Please say you videoed it? Sounds... very odd!

"Why name an animal that won't come when you call it?"*


*A comment concerning cats, but seems appropriate for tortoises as well.

That sounds really very funny.

I bet it was funny Different species of pet animals seem to have strange behaviours when in the same living space. We had a little hamster once who had an extremely strong character. He had one of those plastic balls to exercise in. We also had a Jack Russell dog. The hamster used to aim his ball directly at the back haunches of the sleeping dog on the floor. The poor dog could do nothing back except keep jumping out of the way of the attacking hamster. Oh so embarrassing for the poor dog, when you think that they were bred to destroy rodents as vermin.

Mind you, the hamster had worked out that if he got a fast enough run up to a solid object he could smash open the plastic ball and escape. He should have been named Houdini, but in fact was called Garibaldi. Eventually he did escape, without trace. From his double-padlocked cage. Literally months later he was returned to us via a friend of a friend. He had being living in the wild in the outdoors, and had run into someone's house whilst they were talking on the doorstep. He was very skinny, but still fearsomely brave.

I think my daughter had named him after the biscuit, but in fact in hindsight it should have been that Italian general