Dreaming in Turtle: A Journey Through the Passion, Profit, and Peril of Our Most Coveted Prehistoric Creatures

By Peter Laufer

A fascinating exploration into the world of turtles across the globe; Laufer charts the lore, love, and peril to a beloved species.

Dreaming in Turtle is a compelling story of a stalwart animal prized from prehistory through to today—an animal threatened by human greed, pragmatism, and rationalization. It stars turtles and shady and heroic human characters both, in settings ranging from luxury redoubts to degraded habitats, during a time when the confluence of easy global trade, limited supply, and inexhaustible demand has accelerated the stress on species. The growth of the middle class in high-population regions like China, where the turtle is particularly valued, feeds this perfect storm into which the turtle finds itself lashed. This is a tale not just of endangered turtles but also one of overall human failings, frailties, and vulnerabilities—all punctuated by optimistic hope for change fueled by dedicated turtle champions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Nov 20, 2018
• ISBN: 9781250128102

Peter Laufer

Journalist Peter Laufer is the James Wallace Chair Professor in Journalism at the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication. He is the author of Dreaming in Turtle: A Journey Through the Passion, Profit, and Peril of Our Most Coveted Prehistoric Creatures and Organic: A Journalist's Quest to Discover the Truth Behind Food Labeling.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

OPERATING INSTRUCTIONS FOR THE JOURNALIST

The Santeria priest and I are sitting on the floor in his Havana altar room. On a table across from where his last client left her cash (after the chicken sacrifice on her behalf) is a Buddha and a bust of Mary holding Jesus. Seven glasses of water are lined up on the white-sheet tablecloth along with an assortment of other icons: a portrait of a woman holding a sword and a jeweled goblet, a crinkled tract about Christ, a string of beads—one end dipped into one of the water glasses—and a lone cigarette. Changó—the lord of fire and lightning—is represented by a carved wooden object that looks like an urn, a bowl of squash and apples at its base, at its side a wooden statue of a monk holding a cross and wrapped in a string of beads.

"The jicotea, Babalawo Martinez instructs me about turtles, thinks a lot. That’s why he is very slow. The jicotea is always thinking. He tells me he feels connected to turtles. The jicotea has lots of secrets, secrets given to him by the Supreme Being."

For example? I ask, and for the first time that evening Martinez balks at a question.

"The babalawo has a lot of secrets, too, he says about himself, the priest. And the babalawo would be punished by the spirits of the dead and the orichas if he revealed them. But before we part he offers me the Santeria version of the prayer sung while Cuban priests cut the heads off sacrificed turtles; it translates to Giving the blood to oricha who needs it."

This priest, Babalawo Martinez, is wildly popular with believers. As one of his followers told me, He solves a lot of problems, and people see the results.

We stand and shake hands. If you have any problem we can talk again, he says. At the time I assume he is referring to follow-up questions for my research inquiries. But as he says good-bye, he asks, Do you have a turtle in your house?

Not yet, I answer.

You must, he prescribes. For the good energy and for your health.

I amble toward my waiting purple 1955 Oldsmobile Rocket 88 taxi, with its noisy Chinese bus diesel engine idling and fuzzy dice hanging from the rearview mirror, looking back at Sergio Martinez’s crumbling apartment block. He stands in the doorway under the strand of dried grass that indicates to a needy public that a babalawo practices in the house, a lit cigarette in his hand. We exchange a waved adios.

Seems a bad idea to ignore an order from a Santeria priest. Soon after our Cuban encounter I identify the turtle to accompany me on my continuing chelonian journey. He? she? (I’ve yet to learn) is a rescue, picked up off the streets of Phoenix, Arizona, by a Good Samaritan who found a temporary home for it with Matt Frankel, the Turtle Conservancy board member who houses several dozen mostly endangered turtles and tortoises on his foundation’s acreage outside Prescott. When I express concern about the responsibility of caring for my turtle, Frankel assuages my worry with this assessment: They do wonderfully if they’re neglected. My kind of housemate!

But I do expect, or at least hope, to develop a bond with my new companion. As time passes, the two of you will get to know each other’s personalities, I’m told repeatedly by turtle aficionados. Personality? A turtle? Yes, more than one source promises that turtles and tortoises show identifiable individuality, expressed, for example, by how one might eat out of a companion’s hands, and whether it hides in its shell or reaches out for a caress. And apparently they do, eventually, recognize their human mates. Not that my Sonoran desert box turtle will necessarily be in a hurry to bond if I don’t make the first moves. Reptiles just slow down when there’s nothing to do and they wait for the time to pass, reports its current caretaker, Frankel.

How will this new friend get to my home in Oregon from a thousand miles distant in Arizona? Ah, another example of the intriguing chelonian subculture. My turtle is scheduled to arrive via overnight express. Not just FedEx or UPS, but in a Styrofoam container filled with newspaper for it to cuddle against, delivered to my door by a company that contracts with those express services and that’s found its own niche in the marketplace, a company named Ship Your Reptiles.

Come with me on my quest to document and understand obsessions surrounding turtles and tortoises. As I travel from the giant and infamous Jakarta animal market in Indonesia to a Santeria sacrifice ceremony in Cuba, from a sea turtle nesting beach in Gabon to the turtle-filled bayous of Louisiana, join me and meet a wild cast of characters, including a motley collection of outlaws and their customers—from poachers playing cat and mouse with game wardens, to those obsessive collectors seeking critically endangered species for their illicit collections, to patients desperate for cures and convinced successful treatment only comes from turtle parts, to gourmands ready to break laws for a unique meal.

Looking every bit as prehistoric as they are, turtles and tortoises have lumbered on our land since the age of the dinosaurs. Slow-moving and egg-laying, some live in water and some on land. Some eat meat, using their sharp beaks and strong jaws to slice through prey, while others subsist solely on plants. These creatures all share a common feature: their bodies are encased in a protective shell that comes in a panoply of shapes and sizes and colors. Many of these species can pull their necks and heads into their shells, which are usually durable enough to protect them from the bite of predators. Their shell rings can hint to us of their age and their shapes telegraph whether they are swimmers or walkers—as do their limbs: some have feet, others flippers. They seem to enjoy good night vision, and tests suggest they’re equipped with remarkably long memories. Some live well past a century. For as long as humans have been around, these animals and their eggs have been prized as medicine, religious and pagan talismans, food, decoration, pets, fodder for tales, and so they are of great value to collectors and traders.

Because of their value, the strange and marvelous turtles and tortoises are among the most trafficked and most endangered animals alive today—animals threatened by human greed, pragmatism, and rationalization. The story told here stars turtles and tortoises, along with both shady and heroic human characters, in settings ranging from luxury redoubts to degraded habitats, during a time when the confluence of easy global trade, limited supply, and inexhaustible demand has accelerated the stress on chelonian species. The growth of the middle class in crowded China and Vietnam, where the turtle is particularly valued, accelerates this life-or-death drama. But Asia is not the sole marketplace hoovering up the reptiles. This is a tale not just of endangered turtles and tortoises but also one of overall human failings, frailties, and vulnerabilities—all punctuated by optimistic hope for change fueled by dedicated champions of chelonians.

There is an existential threat to the world’s endangered turtle and tortoise populations, populations that serve as indicator species for our own human survival. If Earth’s environment cannot continue to support a stoic animal that’s been thriving on the planet since the time of the dinosaurs, the rest of the animal kingdom must be considered in jeopardy and we humans—animals ourselves—should worry.

*   *   *

I research, report, and write about the relationships between humans and other animals. The Dangerous World of Butterflies is an investigation into the little-known enclaves of high-dollar international butterfly smuggling. Forbidden Creatures is a study of people who live with dangerous and endangered animals such as chimpanzees and tigers—documenting stories from seemingly happy interspecies families to ghastly tragedies. No Animals Were Harmed seeks to locate the frontier where animal use becomes animal abuse.

While researching the butterfly book I learned of the Philippine forest turtle, an animal thought to be extinct until a colony of them was located in an isolated island outback. The discovery resulted in frenzied collectors paying as much as $2,500 a specimen to poachers, who in turn paid as little as $50 to the locals who captured them—a precious $50 in a place where feeding a family is an economic challenge. The renewed trade again pushed the turtle toward extinction, and its start-stop survival story fueled my intrigue. The Philippine forest turtle led me to begin seeing the lives of turtles and tortoises as a metaphor for our own struggles to survive.

The turtle is not the typical charismatic poster-child animal—it’s no cuddly koala, dog-faced harbor seal, or anthropomorphic polar bear—but it is rooted in many cultural identities. The turtle figures in Native American creation myths, and throughout history across cultures worldwide it also symbolizes wisdom, fertility, and long life.

Come along on my journey as I report little-known smuggling, document endangered species on the brink of extinction, and celebrate turtles and tortoises. Dreaming in Turtle is a love song to these magical, mystical, and mythological creatures. And it is a call to action.

In the waiting room at Trackside Auto Repair in Eugene I’m sitting in a worn and dusty chair while my old Volvo is repaired. Trackside is an informal shop with overtones of the 1960s on display: a framed illustration of Jerry Garcia, Rick—the grizzled mechanic with his ponytail sticking out the back of his baseball cap—and two junkyard dogs. I read. The little mutt (whose name I later learn is Axle), with no encouragement from me, jumps up and makes himself at home on my lap. What is his motivation? A pat or a scratch or a treat? Whatever. But there is no question in my mind that Axle made a decision. He chose to engage me. Will my turtle be so animated? I doubt it, but I am getting anxious to meet him (or her), anxious for the relationship to begin.

I’ve been thinking of turtle names. Fred comes to mind. Fred seems a solid identifier. And maybe unique for a turtle. Plus it works no matter the sex. Another candidate was Speedy, but that seems clichéd. When I ask my turtle benefactor, Matt Frankel, about its name, his response is dismissive. It has no name, he reports. These are not animals that react to names. Maybe, but I’m naming mine.

Our last cat was Schrödinger, a Himalayan flame-tip stray who never completely recovered from the psychological damage he had suffered. The poor cat arrived on our doorstep bruised with lacerations around his ribs and his whiskers snipped short. Schrödinger might fall asleep on my lap, enjoy pets and pats, and follow me up the street to the mailbox. But periodically and for no apparent reason he would become skittish and act as if we were strangers.

Will my turtle ever be anything but a stranger? Will Fred respond when I call out his (or her) name? Fred’s scientific identification is Terrapene ornata luteola; he’s called a box turtle because his hinged plastron allows him the capability to hide his extremities in his box.

Frankel is encouraging about the care and feeding of Fred. You can keep it in an unheated garage, he says. All you need is a four-foot by four-foot pen, a light, and a heating pad. Or, he says, I can keep Fred outside in the temperate Willamette Valley climate, in a wire cage with a wire grid over the top to keep the turtle in and the predators out. Who are the likely predators? In my neighborhood raccoons and coyotes are prime suspects. It can stay in the box most of its life, says Frankel, and only needs to be fed and watered every four days or so. But will Fred be happy confined to a box?

I’m both a tad nervous and somewhat excited about Ship Your Reptiles showing up at my front door with Fred inside his overnight Styrofoam home (I’m starting to think of Fred as a guy), cuddled up with shredded old newspapers. In fact, as the day of Fred’s arrival comes closer, I realize I’m more than a little anxious. I’m concerned about the responsibility of keeping Fred alive and happy, the responsibility of keeping his pen clean and his water fresh and his food supply adequate. But I’m committed. Fred is en route.

Yet when I check back in with my turtle procurer to set up the shipment date, I seek reassurance. First I let Frankel know I’ve already named Fred, and he gives his enthusiastic approval. That’s perfect! he tells me over the phone from Arizona. He’s Fredish. He’s plain, not flashy. He’s not a Francisco or a Federico. He’s definitely a Fred. Funny how just giving him a name and then talking about him as Fred makes the upcoming relationship feel more intimate. We cover some of the basics again: he needs a room that stays at least 60 degrees so that he doesn’t hibernate. (That would be no fun to watch for long and would make it hard for me to develop a relationship with him!) He needs a heat lamp to bask under that glows to 90 degrees and is at least two feet from him so Fred doesn’t cook. He’ll be happy with newspaper on his floor, newspaper that’s changed when it gets soiled—about every two weeks, estimates Frankel. Feeding is two or three times a week: a half cup of fruit or vegetables, a spoonful of wet dog food, and a once-a-week live-earthworm treat.

You can’t screw up this thing, Frankel, an emergency room physician, reassures me. It’s not like a kid. Fred is idiot-proof. You can’t break him. And he continues to make it clear that Fred is not a dog or a cat. If he gets nothing to eat for two weeks, he’ll be no worse for wear. Desert box turtles apparently can go months without eating and a couple of weeks without water. Frankel does instruct me to provide Fred with a water dish to soak in. He estimates Fred’s age at between thirty and fifty years. His carapace is worn smooth in places from rubbing against rocks and brush he’s crawled over and under, and there are some nicks in the shell, probably caused by tumbles from rocks. Frankel calls his weathered appearance interesting because it’s evidence of his life experiences. This is an old soul. We set the delivery date, and, finally, I find myself really looking forward to the arrival of this old soul, Fred.

ONE

THE MAJESTIC TURTLE

— Turtle Tales —

Everybody I encounter seems to have a turtle connection—from the stories of celebrity turtle fanciers (ex-49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, the musician Slash, CNN founder Ted Turner, comedian Sandra Bernhard, artist Julian Schnabel—the list is long and varied) to the experiences of Everyman. But the bond tying humans and turtles through history (and prehistory) is severely threatened because the turtle is in jeopardy.

Everybody has a turtle story, I suggest over a casual drink with my friends Jim and Margaret. We are sitting on their deck overlooking Bodega Bay on the Sonoma County coast in California. It is an opening line I’ve been using since my turtle research started, and it never fails. At first Jim looked skeptical. Everybody has a turtle story, I insist. You have a turtle story.

He thinks for just a moment and then agrees. There was the little box turtle Jim kept in the backyard. They lost track of each other and Jim gave up looking. Five years later he was cleaning debris off the family swimming pool and, yes, there was the box turtle—and no longer so little. Jim fished the turtle out of the pool, and it promptly disappeared again and was never found.

Margaret’s turtle story stars her grandmother at the age of six or seven. She was down in the basement where the pet snapping turtle lived, and she must have been poking at it, because, according to family lore, the turtle grabbed her finger. Grannie screamed and screamed while trying to whip the turtle off her as it windmilled on her finger. Finally she succeeded at flinging it away. Back upstairs she asked why no one came to her aid. She was, after all, screaming.

We thought you were singing, was the response.

Margaret’s and Jim’s turtle stories are kid stuff compared with the image my question conjured in Andrew DeVigal’s memory.

What’s your turtle story? I ask.

I don’t have a turtle story, he protests.

But I insist. Everyone has a turtle story.

Now a colleague of mine at the University of Oregon, former New York Times journalist DeVigal thinks a minute more and then remembers that when he, his wife, and his children were on vacation in Southern California and the family was strolling along Venice Beach, "I saw a turtle walking alone with a hat on its back and it made me think about that powerful Breaking Bad scene."

Ah, yes, quite the nasty use of a tortoise in that show.

Everybody has a turtle story.

One of my students, Timothy Thompson, recounts a family tale starring his great-uncle Craig. Craig was five or six years old when he talked his parents into buying him a turtle for a pet. On the drive home, as Thompson recounts the family yarn, Little Craig was holding his new pet when the turtle decided to withdraw into its shell. Craig thought this meant his turtle was dead. So he rolled down the window and chucked the poor turtle onto the freeway.

I guess I’m just like a turtle that’s hidin’ underneath its horny shell, sang Janis Joplin in Turtle Blues on her 1968 album Cheap Thrills.

When I ask former U.S. poet laureate Kay Ryan for a turtle story, she claims she has none. But she notes that she wrote a poem, Turtle, and then recites a few lines.

Why the turtle? I ask.

Because it’s such a perfect emblem of having to go slowly and of clumsiness and of primitive sorts of movements, she says. It’s one of my favorite poems. It was written because I was so frustrated for so many years, which goes to show how valuable frustration is.

Cat’s Cradle! says my son Michael when I bring turtles into our dinner conversation one night, and he quotes from a Newton Hoenikker letter at the start of the novel. The next day I find the passage in my collection of Vonnegut’s works: We all sat there in the car while Angela kept pushing the starter until the battery was dead. And then father spoke up. You know what he said? He said, ‘I wonder about turtles.’ ‘What do you wonder about turtles?’ Angela asked him. ‘When they pull in their heads,’ he said, ‘do their spines buckle or contract?’

Nope, neither. The neck vertebrae pull into a U shape when most turtles and tortoises yank their heads into their shells. Some species fold their neck sideways under the lip of their carapace.

Adventurer Yossi Ghinsberg chose not to eat a turtle when he was wandering alone, lost and starving in the Bolivian Amazon Basin. He lived to write a survival classic, Lost in the Jungle, and told his turtle story to the BBC for its Survival Stories radio series. It was the first turtle I saw, he said about the potential meal that appeared in the jungle as he wandered, hoping for rescue. He imagined throwing a rock and it hitting the turtle. And then it just looked at me. The moment our eyes met, something happened to me, and I actually asked his forgiveness and promised him I’m not going to hurt him. I let him go. I cannot explain it, he told the radio audience. I had no problem to eat its flesh raw. But there was something that happened when the turtle looked at me. For a second I thought that we are the same thing in the same situation, and I just couldn’t hurt it. This from a man who expressed no trouble killing, roasting, and eating monkeys during his ordeal.¹

Happy Together, a cheery ditty, was released in 1967. I can’t see me lovin’ nobody but you for all my life, sang the Turtles. Not that the band or its members related to chelonians. Their name was just a gimmick, the band’s cofounder, Mark Volman, tells me in 2016. Our manager at the time recommended the name, thinking it would be misread as a British Invasion band, remembers Volman. He thought that people would think that we were like the Beatles. The band was still touring when he and I talked; it was scheduled to play at the Kentucky State Fairgrounds in Louisville that evening. Volman divides his time: when he’s not on the road with the Turtles, he teaches at Belmont University’s Mike Curb College of Entertainment and Music Business in Nashville. We couldn’t come up with anything much better, he says about the band’s name, so we just took it. Despite the lack of connection to turtles, fans shower the band with turtle stuff. But as for Volman and his mates, it was nothing to do with having any kind of relationship to the animal. We were looking for a name to get played on the radio and Turtles seemed like a good way to go.

The flâneurs of mid-1800s Paris strolled the streets for amusement and distraction as they studied the cityscape and its inhabitants. In his analysis of their languid pace, critic Walter Benjamin cites their use of turtles as a tool of their art. Around 1840, Benjamin writes, "it was briefly fashionable to take turtles for a walk in the arcades. The flâneurs like to have the turtles set the pace for them. If they had their way, Benjamin concludes, progress would have been obliged to accommodate itself to this pace."² I found the Benjamin essay in the University of Oregon stacks, a copy heavily annotated in pencil by a previous library client whose marginalia next to this passage is merely one word—an excited Turtles! I agree, the image of Parisian dandies out walking with their leashed turtles is intriguing, entertaining. Trouble is, aside from the undocumented Benjamin reference, I find no record of the oddity. Nonetheless, ever since Walter Benjamin asserted it, the turtle-walking flâneurs show up as footnotes in all sorts of literature, from the academic to the popular.

Then there was Fluff, the Magic Turtle. Back when the Peter, Paul, and Mary dragon tune was popular, my friend Bob Simmons lived in Austin with a box turtle. She kept going under the couch, Simmons remembers. We’d lose her for days and we’d worry, ‘What happened to Fluff?’ When Fluff would finally reappear, she’d be covered with dust bunnies. Simmons and his roommates came up with an easy fix. They epoxied a length of stiff wire to the top of Fluff’s yellow and black carapace. The wire blocked Fluff from burrowing under furniture, and now she was easy to find as she roamed the apartment: flying from the wire was a hand-drawn American flag.

Stanley, the red-eared slider, was the adventurous turtle of another friend, George Papagiannis. He and I talked turtle over a bottle of wine in his Paris flat. His boyhood home was a Manhattan apartment on the fifteenth floor of a skyscraper with a strict no dogs or cats rule. But turtles were allowed, and a series of sliders lived in George’s plastic oval turtle home with a green plastic palm tree and ramp from the island to the pool. George watched them and fed them by hand. The turtles died. His mother orchestrated a moment of mourning before they were, of course, flushed down the toilet. And they were replaced, one slider after another. But Stanley was special. He, claims George, had a distinct