Would You Keep a Turtle if You Found It?

As a child, I often kept box turtles as pets. We lived in my grandmother’s basement for a time, so it seemed a perfect place to let turtles roam around in. My dad, a carpenter, would build them “apartments” and things to play in, and I’d like to think they were relatively happy.

That said, today we know that box turtles are a threatened species. Though habitat destruction and global warming are cited as key reasons why, a primary factor is the actual capture of box turtles in commercial trade. With a low reproduction rate and as many as 30,000 turtles being captured and sold in less than a four-year time frame, even laws against capturing the turtles don’t help much.

That’s where my question comes in. Would you, knowing that the species is already threatened and needs as many turtles to mate as possible to remain alive, keep one as a pet if you found it? Say you saw one crossing the road and wanted to stop and save it. Great idea, right?

But say you also fell in love with the turtle and thought that you just had to keep it—especially considering how your granddaughter loves turtles and is always talking about wanting one. That’s what happened with my parents—and what caused a hullaballoo last weekend at their house.

My mother, knowing my views and having dismissed them as trivial and meaningless plenty of times before, insisted on keeping the baby turtle she’d rescued from the road, saying that either I had to bring it home with me for my daughter or she would keep it in her basement. This isn’t the loving basement environment of my childhood, however; this is one that’s home to two dogs—one that’s rather large and another that’s killed a turtle and brought it back home to display before.

We argued, naturally, and for once I was able to put my foot down and refuse to bring the turtle home. Angry but resigned, my mother then let the turtle go in the woods by her house. I told them that we should let him go where they found him, only across the road in the direction he’d been facing, but she didn’t seem to care about that.

I get it. She comes from a generation of people who put their initials on turtles’ backs because they thought it was fun and cute and that they might just run into their shelled buddies again someday; but our generation knows that’s just making the turtle extra vulnerable to predators.

What would you have done? Seeing as it was only one turtle, would you have kept it? Or would you have released it?