COUNTYWIDE : Ojai Couple Offer Shelter to Tortoises

Max and Lillian Green have spent the past 20 years fighting to protect the endangered desert tortoise. Now they’re up against two unlikely foes--the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Ventura County’s animal shelters.

The Greens, who care for about 200 turtles at their Ojai home, say that, because of the television cartoon characters, real-life turtles are being treated like toys.

“It’s those Ninja Turtles--that’s what’s causing this,” Lillian Green said. “Little children see them on television, and they want to have them, without knowing how to properly care for them at all.”

In the past few months, turtles with human-inflicted wounds have been brought to the Greens’ home, known as Turtle Town.

One small Chinese box turtle the couple treated was tortured by its young owner, said Max Green, 86, a retired electrician. The young boy, he said, “chewed the skin off all the way to the bone by stringing rubber bands on him.”

The box turtle is recovering with the help of sutures by a local vet. But Green said other horror stories abound.

One child tried to pull the shell off his box turtle to make him look more like a Ninja Turtle.

Another tried to carve the shell to match a picture on a Ninja Turtle movie poster.

One boy tried to flush his pet turtle down the toilet, Lillian Green said, “because he said that’s where the Ninja Turtles live.”

As if this weren’t enough to worry about, the Greens believe that turtles are not getting a fair shake from county animal regulation administrators.

Stray desert tortoises picked up by animal shelters previously had been turned over to the Greens, who would then search for the owners. The couple have a California Department of Fish and Game permit to care for the endangered tortoises.

But this summer, animal regulation administrators decided to keep the tortoises until their owners showed up or they could find a new home.

The Greens have questioned the care tortoises receive at the cool, indoor animal shelters--a foreign environment for desert reptiles that need sun and warmth to stay healthy.

“They have air-conditioning down there, and they put the tortoises in with other animals. That’s not the way to care for a tortoise,” Lillian Green said.

Kathy Jenks, director of the Ventura County Animal Regulation Department, scoffed at the notion that the tortoises are not treated properly.

In the past, stray turtles and tortoises were sent to Turtle Town “as a last resort,” Jenks said. “But we were inundating them. Now that we have people who want them, we’d just as soon give them to people who are interested in adopting them.”