How to Buy a Turtle Terrarium

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Tim Cole I'm with the Austin Reptile Service and I've been keeping reptiles and amphibians for over forty years. I'm here to talk to you about buying a turtle enclosure. Obviously, one place you could go to would be a pet store but what you need to keep in mind is what species of turtle you have and how big they're going to get. It's a little bit cheaper if you buy an enclosure that's large enough to house them as an adult. Otherwise, you'll have to keep buying cages as they get larger and grow and a lot of turtles can grow pretty fast. So I'll encourage you to get the largest cage you can to start with. Pet stores are a good place to go, even the newspaper looking for used aquariums depending on whether it's a water turtle or land turtle. It's pretty easy to get a cracked aquarium that people use for fish, now you can use it for a dry turtle such as a box turtle or a tortoise. So newspapers might be a good way to go. Websites, trade shows, are a good way to go. Local herpetological societies, quite often members have used cages they're willing to sell cheap when they're upgrading to a new cage, that's a good way to go also. So there's a variety of sources you can do. You may even want to make your own cage depending on the animal, if it's going to be inside or outside. There's lots of different ways to go. But you want to make sure you use materials that are not going to be harmful to the animal. Materials that are easy to clean and maybe something that you can move around if you need to."