A giant runaway tortoise made a dash for freedom from its owner’s back garden and was found HALF A MILE away.
Samantha Dickson was out with her kids Harry, 16, Amelia, 13, and Jack, seven, when she found slow-moving Rosie.
She discovered 19-year-old Rosie on a driveway just down the road from her house.
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The 34-year-old caught the on-the-loose tortoise to keep her safe and called a local animal centre for advice.
The centre said they only deal with dogs and cats so Samantha took to Facebook to see if she could find the owner.
Samantha said: “My house is on a corner.
“I saw a group of teenagers looking up the road and I thought my dog had escaped and that’s what they were looking at.
“We went round the corner and there was a massive tortoise on my driveway.
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“I thought ‘Oh my God, what is a tortoise doing there?’ You’d expect to see a dog or a cat.
“You expect them to be slow but it was walking really quickly.
“I picked it up so I could park up and it was heavy. I think around 30kg.
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“She came up to the middle of my shin.
“She weed all over my patio and ate all of my dandelions.
“She was very funny. The kids were asking me what they could feed her but I didn’t know. They wanted to keep her as a pet.”
Samantha found Rosie, in Alsager, Cheshire, last Monday (Jul 29), as reported on What’s The Jam.
“The neighbours came to have a look,” she added.
“The kids were very excited about it.
“I kept her in a box that had holes in it to keep her safe.
“The holes weren’t big enough for her to escape but she did try. She’s very strong.”
The account manager managed to hunt down Rosie’s owner who went to collect her.
Samantha said: “I didn’t know what on earth I was supposed to do with a tortoise so I posted on a Facebook group and the owner commented and came around to collect her.
“Apparently they’re known for escaping. She’s never escaped before but she’s always trying.
“She lives in an outdoor enclosure but she broke out and they’d left the gate open and gone out in the morning.
“She must have been out all morning. When I found her, she was going in the same direction as her house so I think she’d been exploring and was on her way back.
“It’s about half a mile to her house but I reckon she walked about a mile if she’d walked down the road and back again.
“My garden needs work so there are lots of plants and flowers for her to eat which is probably why she headed there.
“She’d been on a little adventure. We had her for 45 minutes to one hour. I reckon she was out all morning.”
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