Puppi’s story told by her “mother” Mag.^a Dagmar Hafner, who saved Puppi’s life:

In December 1976, my man and I were on vacation at the Male-Atoll in the Maldives. We were there diving, but on a day off we went to the local fish market on the main island of the atoll. There I saw about a dozen freshly hatched turtles swimming in a pickle jar and filled with water. I asked the seller why they were sold, and he proclaimed enthusiastically: “Baby turtle good for breakfast, you fry like egg, delicious!” Startled by the response I asked how much they cost, and he answered: “Only one dollar, Miss, very very good!”. I had to rescue at least one of the baby turtles from the certain death in the frying pan. I handed him one dollar and received a little plastic bag with a fidgeting turtle.

Originally, my plan was to release it into the sea near my bungalow, but as I arrived there, one of the hotel staff passed me carrying an adult sea turtle which he caught from the sea. He happily proclaimed that this means that he and his family would have a great meal, and he headed off to the island. At that moment I made my decision: “Puppy” won’t end as a meal, she will head home with me to Vienna. During the flight she traveled with me in my purse, and back at home she came into our 100 liter aquarium where she immediately felt at home. Back then, because we loved diving, we had two 200 liter and one 100 liter aquarium and about twenty years of experience in aquaristics.

Puppi ate a lot of lettuce and Greek sardines, which she needed to harden her rapidly growing shell. At that time, Dr. Luttenberger was the director of the Aquarium of the zoo Schönbrunn and in the same diving club as we were. He helped us a lot with expert advice, especially as Puppi got pneumonia and could not dive anymore. With antibiotics made for chickens she recovered quickly. She outgrew the 100 liter aquarium very fast and switched to our 200 liter aquarium, but even there she soon had not enough space to maneuver freely. Therefore, we bought a small pool, equipped it with a filter, a circulation pump and a heat pump as she had suffered a burn on a fin on a heating rod that we had before.

She was always happy to see us and even recognized the different members of our family by the sound of their footsteps. Only if visitors came by, she was very agitated and began to swim in circles and to splash salt water all over the place. She loved it to be petted on her head and reached out to me whenever I approached the aquarium.

When Puppi was little, we once took her on vacation to Menorca. I built a small harness with a leash made from ribbons and went diving with her. Even years after we had visited Menorca I was known there as the “senora with the sea turtle”! Puppi grew constantly and got very heavy, and the cleaning process of the aquarium became harder and harder, especially if you had to lift her out of the pool. We planned to move to a different house, and it slowly grew on us that we had to find a new home for our beloved pet. It was a hard decision, but I finally called the Haus der Meeres and received an enthusiastic response, and so she moved into a new home. She got a giant aquarium, and I got the promise that I can visit her whenever I like behind the scenes to pet her head as she always liked it. I am very happy that she has such a wonderful life at the Haus des Meeres and that she became a real star in the aquarium. I am well aware that she will outlive me, and today I only have a car license plate with “save the turtles”, but my heart will always be with the sea turtles.