SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Ownership of a tortoise, like life itself, has its downsides. Mona Heflin knows both well.

Slim Shady, her roughly 70-pound, 22-year-old sulcata tortoise, farts loudly, sometimes knocks her down and has forced her to find him after absconding in her North Highlands neighborhood when her front gate was left open. Still, she loves him and doesn’t seem enthusiastic about the idea of giving him up. But she must.

Heflin is 71, her husband died in 2018, she takes care of an adult son with diabetes and she has her own health issues. She said she has an aortic aneurysm and blocked arteries and is reluctant to have the bypass surgery she needs. She needs the joy her tortoise brings, but not the trouble.

Slim Shady needs a new home.

She will miss him dancing, which she taught him to do. She will miss him responding to her call and following her. She will just miss him.

“There’s been times when he shows me love and compassion,” Heflin said. “And it’s the cutest thing.” As his namesake would say, to paraphrase, she loves living in the moment. But now has the once in a lifetime opportunity to find him a new home.

Pet tortoises like Slim Shady commonly wind up needing a new home. Tortoises typically live 80 to 150 years. One particularly famous tortoise, Jonathan, is about 193 years old and was the subject of an April Fool’s Day death hoax. Guinness World Records noted in 2019 that Jonathan was “the oldest-known land animal alive today.”

How Slim Shady came to Heflin’s family

Originally, Slim Shady’s name was Sadie. Heflin’s family thought he was female.

It was the mid-2000s. Heflin’s granddaughter Sierra Scorcio was living with her and had asked her mother, Heflin’s former daughter-in-law, for a water turtle. Scorcio’s mother returned from a trip with the tortoise. Scorcio, who was about 8 at the time, named it Sadie after a character from a Disney show.

Sometime thereafter, they brought the tortoise they knew as Sadie to a pet store. There, the tortoise became visibly aroused seeing another tortoise. Scorcio nearly dropped her tortoise, thinking his reaction meant that he was dying.

“They ended up telling us that in the wild, that’s how they showed dominance and let other tortoises know that they’re a male and they’re here and they’re present,” Scorcio said. “And that’s the day we found out that Sadie was actually a male.”

Scorcio, who was a fan of rapper Eminem, renamed her tortoise Slim Shady.

In general, having a tortoise was both an unusual and rewarding childhood experience for Scorcio. The family treated him like an ordinary dog or cat. She brought her tortoise everywhere with her, including to her school for show-and-tell when she was in the fourth grade. Everyone “thought he was cool,” Scorcio said.

“Back in the early 2000s, not a lot of people had desert tortoises walking around their front yard in North Highlands,” Scorcio said. “But everybody seemed to really like it. I still have friends to this day that’ll go by and check on him and my grandma.”

Heflin said that school buses of children take note of Slim Shady and that police officers have stopped by to take photos with him. “He’s made quite a name for himself,” Heflin said.

Scorcio, like her grandmother, has been close with Slim Shady from the beginning.

“He’s just a big lover with the biggest personality,” Scorcio said.

Personality under the shell

Tortoises can charm with their unique personalities, explained Jim Stout, executive director and CEO of the Tortoise Conservancy Inc, which is based near Orlando, Florida.

Stout recalled a gopher tortoise his family called Herman that lived nearby for a few years during Stout’s childhood. Gopher tortoises can wander off to live elsewhere and Stout’s family eventually lost track of him. But in the years he lived nearby, Herman would amble up to the side of Stout’s family swimming pool.

“My mom would bring us out lettuce, so we’d sit there and hand-feed him,” Stout said. “He’d go back off afterwards and do his thing.”

Scorcio eventually couldn’t be physically close to Slim Shady anymore. Near the end of 2014, Scorcio moved to Oregon, having struggled with substance abuse as a teenager in Sacramento.

Scorcio is now 30, lives in Portland and said she has been clean for 12 years. She now has a daughter, Cadynce and a son, Tanner who love Slim Shady and see him when they visit Heflin. Scorcio still considers Slim Shady to be her tortoise, though she said her apartment wouldn’t be appropriate for him.

“I would love to take Shady,” Scorcio said. “I don’t have a yard to put him in. If I had a way to have like $5,000 to rent a house tomorrow, I would do it in a heartbeat and I would come get him.”

Where Slim Shady might go

Heflin and Scorcio have ruled out some possible destinations for Slim Shady.

A neighbor once asked Heflin what she might sell him for. Heflin did research online and said she saw that a grown tortoise might fetch $1,200. She asked her neighbor where Slim Shady would be living. He explained that it would be his backyard where he had a wooden fence.

Heflin turned this down. She has a wrought iron fence in her front yard for Slim Shady. He can chew through wooden fences.

If Slim Shady were to go to a private owner, Heflin said she hoped that the home “would provide safe containment. Because that’s what I worry about most, getting out and getting hit by a car.” Scorcio worries about Slim Shady going to a private owner, not confident they would be up to the responsibility of caring for him.

Most, if not all, of Heflin and Scorcio’s family either can’t or won’t take Slim Shady.

Scorcio is not the only one who worries about whether a private individual can properly care for a tortoise. Katie Rickon is the owner and founder of the nonprofit Tortoise Acres Rescue & Sanctuary near Redding and is cautious about future homes for the tortoises she cares for. She knows how people respond to such stories.

“You’re going to have everybody and their mother, ‘Oh, that poor lady, we’ll adopt that tortoise’ and they’re not ready for it,” Rickon said.

She said tortoises sometimes stay at her sanctuary for eight months before a proper home is found.

“We screen our people like absolute crazy,” Rickon said. “They have to have a quarter of an acre minimum to have a sulcata. You can’t have a house in a backyard. It just doesn’t work. They have to have a lot of acreage to be able to roam around.”

Rickon said that at 70 pounds, Slim Shady was undersized and likely hadn’t had adequate space for his habitat to this time. She noted a 30-year-old tortoise that was 220 pounds.

Other options include, potentially, the Sacramento Zoo, which has multiple tortoises. Nancy Smith-Fagan, a zoo spokesperson said she would have to check with a zoo caretaker to see if there was a potential place for Slim Shady.

Sanctuaries like Rickon’s are an option, too, though it can be competitive to get tortoises in. Rickon said she had arranged adoptions for more than 3,200 tortoises across the country in eight years and that she turns away 20 potential donations per week. She attributed the level of interest in tortoise donation to life changes.

“COVID, I was just inundated,” Rickon said. “People have to move or they’re in a rental house and they get kicked out and then they leave their tortoise behind.”

Situations like Heflin’s aren’t unusual, either. Rickon estimated that around half the calls she gets are related to people in ill health who have a tortoise and don’t have family members willing to care for it next. Rickon noted that many have her sanctuary in their wills.

Rickon expressed interest in picking up Slim Shady, though she also said it was $1.25 per mile and that there was a $200 surrender fee.

At the end of the day, where Slim Shady goes could come down to how Heflin and Scorcio feel about it. Scorcio has researched sanctuaries and has mixed feelings about them, noting that tortoises are monogamous and mate for life.

“I just don’t want him to get lost in the mix of other turtles,” Scorcio said.

Heflin also has an emotional bond with Slim Shady.

“Once a day,” Heflin said, “I’ll come out and talk with him and rub his whole shell and let him know he’s a good boy and I love him, God loves him and everything’s cool.”

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