Hey everyone,

While out feeding my Sibes this morning, I found Kieron playing with something. I put her food plate down and started to investigate. Turns out, she found a medium sized box turtle and had attempted to "play" with it. I shooed her away from the poor turtle and brought it in to examine its wounds. Kieron, not meaning to of course, destroyed the front part of the carapus[sp?] part of the shell. In other words, the part of the shell that is thinner and hangs over a bit on all parts of it. Kieron tored all of this off on the front. There isn't very much blood, but there are spots here and there. More than anything though, is that whole part of the shell is moist and wet, but its not blood. Kieron also got ahold of part of the back carapus[sp?], too.

Attempting to bring comfort to the turtle, I cleaned it of all the mud on its injuries and the rest of its shell. I put warm water into the bathtub and let it soak in there for about a half an hour. This seemed to help because the turtle finally came out of its shell and tried to dig a hole in the corner of the tub.

There seems to be some injuries inside of the shell, but not bad ones. The worst part is where I described it earlier. This doesn't seem to affect the turtle too much, though it looks horribly painful. The turtles head and legs are just fine. It is just now starting to poke its head out farther and farther, just looking around. I tried to get it to eat some earthworms but it didn't want to eat. I will try to feed it again soon.

The turtle is exactly at this moment slowly walking around my room. The poor thing.

So, for any reptile experts out there, could you lend me a hand? Before any of you suggest I take my turtle to a reptilian vet, I'll tell you now. There is no reptile vet where I live. I used to have an iguana who got sick and I took him to our dog's vet, the only vet around here, and the vet didn't know what to do. He doesn't specialize with reptiles.

So if any of you can answer some of these questions, I'd really appreciate it.

-How can I clean the wound and keep infections away? What should I use?
-Any suggestions on if I should bandage the wound to keep it covered?

Thanks for any help anyone can offer me. Please wish the little turtle luck!

Hiya. Fingers crossed for the little chap.
I know nothing about turtles, but the reptile trust are very knowledgable. (Sorry they've moved and are know called the Exotic Animal Welfare Trust).

This is their website     http://www.eawt.org/
Hope you manage to get some help.

I don't know much about reptiles, but are you sure it's a turtle and not a tortoise? Turtles live in water and have flippers, whereas tortoises have legs and live on land. If it's a tortoise I believe you can rub some sort of ointment into it's shell to help it, but I don't know what :(

Good luck with your new friend :D

Isn't sibeluver in the US? Tortoises are called turtles over there ...

Never thought of that. Bit dim at times, me :)

That's right, I'm in the US and we call smaller turtles... turtles! The huuuuge ones that are about as big as three grown men are called tortoises.

Anyways, I couldn't find any information on how to help the turtle so I decided to take my own action. I put some infection-fighting medicine on the shell and left it to dry. Within a few hours, it looked better already. I took the turtle outside to let it walk around and it just came right out of its shell, literally! It seemed to act just perfectly fine and wanted to go, so I let it. I put it over the fence opposite the dog's area of the yard and decided I would just have faith that the turtle would heal up just fine and go on to live its happy life. There wasn't really anything else I could do about for it, so I did my best. =)

Oh yeah, if there are any people around here knowledgeable with kittens, please message me, I have a problem with one! Thanks!