09/02/2026
🐢💚 This is an extraordinarily proud moment for Dino Buddies.
For years, we’ve dreamed about finding ways for Dino Buddies to participate directly in wildlife conservation.
We love bringing animals into classrooms, libraries, festivals, and communities—but we’ve always wanted Dino Buddies to be more than an animal encounter company.
We want to make a difference for wildlife, too.
And that dream is becoming real.
In partnership with Gorman Heritage Farm and the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, Dino Buddies is participating in the ROBOTS Initiative — Repatriating Ohio’s Box Turtles.
Today, six adult Eastern Box Turtles are in our care at Gorman Heritage Farm. These turtles were confiscated from a terrible situation where they were being housed in a dirty dog crate with limited access to fresh water.
These six lives entrusted to our care mean more to us than we can possibly explain.
And one of the things we’re most excited about is what our partnership with Gorman represents.
🌱 We’re building a bridge between conservation and agriculture.
Agriculture and wildlife conservation are sometimes treated as opposing forces competing for the same land and resources. But at the end of the day, healthy farms and healthy wildlife depend on many of the same things: healthy soil, clean water, thriving ecosystems, responsible land stewardship, and people who care about what happens to the land around them.
Dino Buddies and Gorman Heritage Farm are working together to show what can happen when those goals meet.
Gorman isn’t simply providing us with a place to care for these turtles. Their property is part of the larger conservation effort and provides habitat where eligible turtles can eventually be returned to the wild.
Even the turtles’ daily care connects back to the farm. We’re working with Gorman’s garden department to incorporate fresh, farm-grown produce into their diets whenever available.
From the food they eat to the habitat we’re working to protect, agriculture is becoming part of their conservation story.
And we’re bringing the next generation with us.
We currently have a student intern working alongside our team and gaining real-world experience in wildlife care and conservation through this project.
That part is incredibly important to me.
I’ve been fortunate throughout my own career to have opportunities that allowed me to learn, get my hands dirty, build experience, and develop a network of incredible wildlife professionals.
I want Dino Buddies to be that opportunity for someone else.
I want passionate young wildlife enthusiasts to have somewhere they can build their skills, make connections, participate in meaningful conservation work, and begin discovering where they belong in this field.
That’s what paying it forward looks like to us.
💚 Now, we could use our community’s help.
Dino Buddies has taken on the financial responsibility for the care of these six turtles and our portion of this conservation work. We’re incredibly proud to do it—but conservation isn’t free.
Our expenses include food and husbandry supplies, disease screening, field and tracking equipment, habitat work, monitoring, and everything else necessary to care for these animals responsibly and contribute to the larger project.
We’ve created a GoFundMe to help us continue this work.
🐢 Support our Box Turtle Rehabilitation & Release Project:
https://www.gofundme.com/f/dino-buddies-box-turtle-rehabilitation-and-release
Every donation helps. And if you aren’t able to donate, sharing their story helps tremendously, too.
These may be six box turtles, but to us, they represent something much bigger.
They represent six lives entrusted to our care.
They represent collaboration between agriculture and wildlife conservation.
They represent opportunities for future wildlife professionals.
They represent a new chapter for Dino Buddies.
And they represent years of dreaming about what this company could become.
Education. Animal care. Conservation. Opportunity.
This is the Dino Buddies we’ve always wanted to build.
And we’re just getting started. 🐢💚
