Reptiles & amphibians · plate 43 of 60
Tortoise
Testudo graeca
Slow is not a flaw. It is a policy.
Only 1.1% of people are Tortoises. (estimated)
If you're a Tortoise
You do things at your own speed and the speed is not negotiable. Deadlines are suggestions, panic is other people's hobby, and you have outlasted every colleague who told you to hurry. You carry your home with you and you are never really away from it. When life gets cold you simply stop for a few months and resume in spring.
A spur-thighed tortoise named Timothy lived at Powderham Castle in England and died in 2004 at an estimated age of about 160.
The Tortoise as a spirit animal
You are steady, patient and almost impossible to rush, which makes you the person everyone relies on and nobody invites to a sprint. You finish, eventually, and what you finish stays finished. The flaw is that you can mistake stubbornness for principle and a closed shell for an argument. A tortoise has been winning races against hares for twenty-five centuries by the simple method of not stopping.
Grounded in how the species actually lives; nothing borrowed from anyone's tradition. Why we put it that way.
How to get along with a Tortoise
Do
- Give deadlines in seasons, not hours.
- Offer food; a tortoise's priorities are sun, lettuce and being left alone, in that order.
- Accept that a withdrawn head means the conversation is paused, not over.
Don't
- Don't flip their plans upside down; they have no quick way of righting themselves.
- Don't schedule anything important in winter.
When it goes wrong: A tortoise under pressure pulls in and waits for you to go away; it works on predators and will work on you, so come back later with lettuce.
The Tortoise in a relationship
You are slow to warm and slower to leave. You do not fall in love so much as settle into it, and once settled you are as fixed as the shell on your back. You are unlikely to be the one who flirts; your approach is direct, a little clumsy and completely sincere.
Field notes
Every animal is placed on six personality traits derived from how the species lives. Your answers are placed on the same six, and the closest animal wins. How the scoring works
- Sociability
- 1
- Boldness
- 4
- Energy
- 0
- Curiosity
- 3
- Devotion
- 0
- Roaming
- 1
- The shell is part of the skeleton: the ribs and spine are fused into it, so the tortoise cannot leave it.
- Tortoises hibernate for months in winter, slowing the heart and barely breathing.
- A male courts by ramming the female's shell and nipping at her legs, which works more often than it should.
Tortoises in literature
- The Tortoise — Aesop's Fables (The Tortoise and the Hare), Aesop (550 BCE)
- Slow-and-Solid Tortoise — The Beginning of the Armadillos (Just So Stories), Rudyard Kipling (1902)
- Kambugriva the Tortoise — Panchatantra (The Tortoise and the Geese), traditional (Sanskrit) (200 BCE)
Characters from public-domain works. Company, not a verdict.
Closest personalities
The animals whose profiles sit nearest to the Tortoise's. If you got Tortoise, one of these was probably your runner-up.
Other reptiles & amphibians
Among the 60
The Royal Natural History, Richard Lydekker (1896). Public domain, viacommons.wikimedia.org.All credits
