Feeding Your Box Turtle

Box turtles are not picky eaters.  They are omnivorous and prefer variety in their meals.  They enjoy eating night crawlers, worms, slugs, crickets, and an ultimate favorite, snails.  But when feeding your turtle snails, you must be very careful and make sure that the snail has not been near any sort of pesticides or snail bait.  This might cause an illness to your turtle and we obviously don’t want that to happen.  In the website http://www.turtlecareguide.net, you can find more information about the causes of turtle illness and the effects of consuming snail bait or pesticides.  But besides the usual creep crawlies as a main dish for your petite companion, you can also feed them some meat. The only catch is that it must always be cooked meat.  If you feed your turtle raw chicken, there is a chance that it will have salmonella so raw meat is unadvisable.

Besides meat, turtles also eat a variety of fruits and vegetables.  You can feed your turtle some bits of tomato, apple, cantaloupe, melon, blackberries and strawberries.  Just make sure that they get plenty of vitamins and nutrients.  One nutrient that is most important in a little turtle’s diet is calcium.  It is advised to sprinkle calcium carbonate and calcium lactate into their food once a week.  A list of food that can be fed to turtles can be found in http://www.turtlecareguide.net.  But if you prefer to feed your pet with dry food, then that is also acceptable.  But in http://www.turtlecareguide.net, it is advised that when you feed your turtle with dry food, no extra vitamins and minerals should be added because dry foods already contain enough of it.