Red Foot Tortoise

Ed Stafford, the man who walked the Amazon - interview

For a 6ft 1in man, there is a lot less of Ed Stafford than you'd expect. His trousers hang around his hips slightly and although he is bigger now than he was nine months ago, he is still rebuilding the muscle he lost during his incredible 6,000 mile journey from the source of the Amazon in the Peruvian Andes to its mouth in eastern Brazil.

Perhaps surprisingly, the 35-year-old former British Army captain wasn’t that fit when he landed at his starting point in Camana, Peru. He had decided that given all the walking he was about to embark on he would just get fit as he went. But as the months went by and the miles under foot hit their thousands, instead of becoming an Adonis, he found that his muscle mass started to break down and he got weaker and weaker.

Lack of food drove him to break their no-hunting policy. Ed recalls one time after two days on low rations when he and his Peruvian walking companion Cho spotted a red-footed tortoise nestling in the leaf litter. They wasted no time worrying about ethics and butchered the tortoise there and then, before roasted it over a woodchip fire in garlic and oil to make tortoise jerky.

They also scavenged for palm hearts, wild tomatoes, nuts, wild bananas and later fished for piranha, narrowly missing a run in with a two-metre electric eel capable of producing a potentially lethal 500 watt shock.

"I think it can always look out of context and in fact I just adapted to life in the jungle," he says. “We tried to deliberately not hunt but we needed to survive."

Cho joined the expedition six months into the trip, just before heavy flooding pushed them onto the drug-trafficking route through a lawless region of Colombia. Ed had fallen out with his original walking companion Luke Collyer after just 68 days; something the pair had not anticipated.

Everyone in the drugs trafficking region was involved in cocaine production, from the local peasant who grew cocoa leaves, to the people managing the town.

"In the town plaza there is a huge concrete coca leaf, which is the plant they make cocaine out of, and it is not very subtle, they don't try to hide the fact that that is where all the money comes from," he says.

The Colombian drugs trail included "The Red Zone" in Peru where petrified locals believed the "gringos" – including Ed – were trying to kill them to harvest their organs; something which understandably led to some hostile encounters.

poor little red foot - Tortoise Forum - Tortoise Husbandry Community

Hi Kendallll, its a terrible thing to see how the pet stores treat tortoises. Does the RF have any pyramiding? It is really next to impossible to give an exact age with out knowing the day he hatched. With no pyramiding and it looks like a healthy tort, I would say about a year and half or two years. May be a little older if he has been mistreated previously. If you buy this little guy, they are just going to order a new one to take it's place. Not that one should be sacrificed for the good of all, but what are we saying when we spend our money to a box store who obviously doesn't care one way or another if the tortoise is bought or actually taken care of. They have what they want, your business. Who is going to buy the next one they ship in? Up here the RF babies at the box stores go for between 500 and 800 each and are sadly neglected ect ect...... Whenever I have access to a wholesale lot from a breeder i keep the prices sane when I sell them and at less than half the store price..... and I try to make sure NO ONE spends that there as they are just fueling the fire so to speak when i see them 4 years later still in the 20 gallon they were sold with and all the trimmings with the pyrimided shell ect ect... It is sad to see them there, I feel it every time I go into petsmart/petco and see all of those poor russians sitting in their tanks, though the russians seem to sell quickly in my area. Remember if you buy it they will replace it to sell again, I am not saying don't buy it, because I think most of us would feel the same as you do, but don't be surprised if you see another in it's place in less than a month. At the very least you could and try to educate the store so they can keep better care of them until they are sold. Let us know what ever you decide to do.

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