On TikTok, Jaime Simpson largely uses her platform to share the daily realities of living with Vascular Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome and epilepsy — all while raising a household of kids and animals with her partner.
But on July 22, she shared a shocking video that has since garnered over 5.5 million views.
In the video, Simpson can be seen leaning over a dumpster in a parking lot. Originally, she and her partner were on a mission to see if they could salvage anything from the trash behind a pet store to donate to a local dog shelter.
“Local pet stores have told us in the past that they throw away things for pets because they aren’t allowed to donate it and have encouraged us to check,” Simpson explained in the caption of the video. “So every once in a while I check to see if there’s donatable items since our local rescues are always in need.”
Instead, they found a baby tortoise trapped in a small container.
“I think it’s alive,” Simpson gasps in the video. “No, it’s definitely moving. They literally threw out an animal.”
“Who would do that?” She asks, outraged. “Oh, look at him. He’s so scared.”
She prompts her partner to film the inside of the dumpster to show what they unearthed him from.
“It's 103 degrees outside,” she stresses. “There’s flies everywhere. Look in there, show how gross that is that they put him in there.”
Virtually every nation with formal animal protection legislation prohibits the active abandonment or intentional disposal of a live animal.
However, civilian documentation has found that neglected or dying animals — typically fish, birds, and small rodents — have occasionally been found discarded in pet store dumpsters throughout the United States.
In 2023, one woman found 20 fish and 10 shrimp still alive in a dumpster behind a Petco store in Fort Myers, Florida.
In 2021, a man went viral after he rescued a live parakeet from a Petco dumpster and named it “Budgit.”
Fortunately, this story has a happy ending. Within 24 hours of her first video going viral, Simpson posted an update on the baby tortoise.
“According to the exotic vet, it is a hybrid pardalis-leopard tortoise,” she shared on July 23. “It may get bigger than most leopard tortoises. It’s a hatchling, so we have a lot of caring to do for it right now! It’s eating and drinking well and is healthy.”
In the state of Arizona, native tortoises are fully protected by state and federal laws. However, as a type of leopard tortoise, the rescued turtle is a non-native species that must be raised in captivity.
“We are definitely keeping the tortoise,” Simpson said. “I’m getting a lot of messages from people who want to take the tortoise, and I think that I should just say that we’re gonna keep him.”
“I have spent well over $1,500 on this tortoise, of my own money,” she explained. “I’ve seen a couple people who said, ‘Make a wishlist,’ but I really don’t want anything from anyone. The plan is to turn a giant dog crate into an enclosure.”
“Trust me,” she added, “this will be the most spoiled tortoise in the world.”
See the rescue below:
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Featured Image: Screenshot via @embracingecho/TikTok
