AN EALING animal lover's dream of caring for two exotic pets turned to heartbreak when they were seized by customs officers.
Janice Jackson took the Mediterranean spur-thighed tortoises home through Heathrow without a hitch on Saturday 11 after paying £15 each for them in Tunisia. The problems began last week when she phoned the authorities to make sure they were legal.
The 53-year-old who lives with her 14-year-old daughter and 16-year-old son in Ealing Green, said: "I looked down in one shop and saw a box packed with little tortoises. I just fell in love and said: 'how much are they?' without thinking.
"I was a little uneasy in the back of my mind but I'm old enough to remember tortoises being a common pets, like on Blue Peter, so I didn't think it would be such a big deal."
Christened Ali and Barbara, the pair were safely stowed in a chest of drawers as they went through the hand baggage check in Tunisia and no-one noticed them begin their better life in Britain.
Ms Jackson even baked soil to sterilise it, mixed it with kiln-dried sand, drew up plans for a run and researched diet and how to keep them warm.
The jazz singer added: "I want the best for them, if I didn't think I could care for them properly I wouldn't feel comfortable about having them.
"But the more people I spoke to afterwards, the reaction was: 'are you sure about this? Do you know what you've done?'"
Ms Jackson phoned the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) who contacted the UK Border Agency.
She added: "I owned up, it's not for me to say what my punishment should be I suppose but I wish they would've just given me a fine and let me keep them."
Confiscating them on Friday, Jan Sowa of the Border Agency's Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species team explained Ms Jackson was not alone.
He said: "Off the top of my head we probably get a call about one of these every couple of weeks.
"More often than not we deal with people who are unaware of the law, not people trying to break it.
