Having a correct and healthy diet for your Red Footed Tortoise is perhaps the most critical part of its care. A correct diet insures that your Red Footed Tortoise well develop correctly, stay strong, stay healthy, and even determine the quality of the colors on the tortoise.
Basically, a Red Footed Tortoise’s diet can be broken down into three parts: leafy greens, fruits, and supplements
Also remember the list below are not complete, but instead they provide an accurate guideline for your tortoise’s diet.
Leafy Greens
Leafy greens are a very important staple in your tortoise’s diet and should be the majority of your tortoise’s diet due to the nutrients that are packed in them. A few basic leafy greens that you may like to include in your tortoise’s diet are romaine lettuce, collard greens, mustard greens, kale, and occasionally spinach.
Fruits
Fruits are another important part of your Red Footed Tortoise’s diet. These fruits include tomatoes, strawberries, blue berries, black berries, apples, melons, papaya, and bananas.
Fruits should only be fed two to three times every week due to how sweet they are. If a Red Footed Tortoise is fed too much fruit that is all it will want to eat and it won’t receive the vital nutrients that come from the leafy greens.
Supplements
To enhance your tortoise’s diet supplements are used, most importantly a calcium supplement. The calcium supplement is important because it insures healthy and strong bone and shell development. These calcium supplements can be bought at any pet store with a reptile section or online. Lightly dust your tortoise’s meals with the calcium supplement on a semi-regular basis.
Foods to Avoid
A frequent mistake made by new tortoise owners is buying and feeding their tortoises pellet foods. Pellet foods don’t contribute essential nutrients to your tortoise’s diet and they also contain grain products which are a cause of pyramiding tortoise shells.
Also, all other human food should not be fed to your tortoise, except the ones mentioned in this article and other sources.
Water
It is also important that you keep a constant water source available to your Red Footed Tortoise. I keep a shallow dish of water in my tortoise’s habitat. Make sure the dish is big enough for your tortoise to get into because it can double as a soaking pan.
Be sure to replace the water regularly because dirt and other waste products well get into it on a regular basis.