A family with a lost tortoise has discovered an unusual way to persuade their pet to come home.
The Horner family spent hours looking for Boris and Lily in their garden after the pair broke down their enclosure and made a run for it.
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Lily was eventually found in the geraniums, but Boris remained missing and the family grew worried. "Anyone who has lost a turtle or tortoise, even momentarily, knows the feeling of near heart-stopping panic," says the Tortoise Trust.
Increasingly desperate, the Horner family turned to the unusually abundant supply of tortoise pornography on YouTube.
"We went back outside, played that, and lo and behold Boris appeared," they said.
Dr James Gibbs, an expert in Galapagos tortoises, told The Times that few tortoises would be able to resist the sound of a reptilian orgy.
"Males do troll around for the sounds of mating," he said. "They make quite a lot of noise – we can hear them groaning for miles."
Dominant males then fight over a single female, pushing each other off as they attempt to balance on her shell, often damaging it.
The noise the animals make while mating is often extremely startling – in fact, the sound of lovemaking tortoises was used to voice the Velociraptors in Jurassic Park.
Warning: the following video may be unsuitable for young tortoises
-
How will the new Repayment Assistance Plan for student loans work?the explainer The Repayment Assistance Plan (RAP) will replace existing income-driven repayment plans
-
In the Spotlight Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has been at odds with US forces
-
Music reviews: Ethel Cain, Amaarae, and The Black KeysFeature "Willoughby Tucker, I'll Always Love You," "Black Star," and "No Rain, No Flowers"
-
Shell’s North Sea oil U-turn: ‘a first victory in a longer war’?Speed Read Controversy after oil giant pulls out of proposed Cambo project
-
Fires, floods and storms: America’s ‘permanent emergency’ has begunSpeed Read This summer of climate horror feels like the ‘first, vertiginous 15 minutes of a disaster movie’, says The New York Times
-
Hot air and empty rhetoric: is the UK acting too slowly on climate change?Speed Read ‘Every day, new evidence accumulates that humanity is on an unsustainable path’
-
Germany floods: what led to this ‘once-in-a-century’ disaster?Speed Read Nearly 200 people died in Germany and Belgium; hundreds are still unaccounted for
-
Penguin colony at risk as Somerset-sized iceberg bears down on British overseas territorySpeed Read Several species face starvation if the icy giant blocks access to feeding grounds
-
‘Full of hot air’: climate experts exposed as academia’s most frequent flyersSpeed Read Study results trigger calls for environmentalists to ‘look in the mirror’
-
Mystery of millions of migrating birds dropping dead from US skiesSpeed Read Some experts believe the West Coast wildfires may be to blame for ‘unprecedented’ mass bird deaths in New Mexico
-
Americans warned not to plant mystery seeds being sent to homes nationwide from ChinaSpeed Read Officials say the unsolicited packages have been mailed to residents in at least 27 US states
