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In a sprawling 1.5-acre backyard populated by Silkie chickens, peacocks, dogs, tortoises, emus, and a spider monkey, you might think it’s easy to lose track of a critter here or there. But Gabriel Fernandez, an animal lover and landscaper who lives just southeast of Dallas, takes pride in carefully checking on his menagerie of more than forty pets every evening, so it wasn’t long before he noticed that something was amiss.On the evening of August 29, Fernandez was making his rounds after work, feeding and watering the animals. But one of his three sulcata tortoises, Lorenzo, was nowhere to be found. Fernandez and his family scattered to search for the 27-year-old, 180-pound tortoise, but their efforts proved futile. As weeks passed, Fernandez, who’d owned Lorenzo…

The post Why Are So Many Tortoises on the Loose in Texas? appeared first on Texas Monthly.

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