Meet the ETA Team

European Turtle Alliance (ETA) BOARD

Eleanor Tirtasana Chubb, UK – Chair

Eleanor has been involved in chelonian conservation and welfare for over 20 years. She was invited onto the Europe committee by co-founder Henk Zwartepoorte in 2012. She has chaired Europe work since 2016 with the clear aim to build a turtle conservation movement in Europe. Eleanor is the founder of Tortoise Welfare UK and runs a variety of chelonian education programmes across the British community.

Kim Simmons, UK – Vice Chair

Kim has been the owner and director of independent Linton Zoo since 1972. Linton Zoo is home to a wide variety of chelonian species. Kim has dedicated her life to education and conservation. She is an experienced field program fundraiser and, through Linton Zoo, participates in collaborative studbooks for conservation breeding program. She is a member of the British and Irish Association of Zoos and Aquariums (BIAZA).

Boris Berlijn, The Netherlands

Boris is a teacher at a vocational school for students that study to work with small mammals, reptiles and amphibians. At home Boris has a small tortoise sanctuary and currently (including private animals) has 30+ tortoises in a reptile room at his facility and in outdoor enclosures in the front- and backyard. And besides tortoises Boris keeps Leopard geckos, Bearded Dragons, a Mexican Pine snake and some tarantulas and millipedes. With the European Turtle Alliance Boris hopes to gain more awareness about tortoises and their wild habitat in order to prevent more habitat loss and decrease and even extinction from turtles in the wild. Boris is also Chair of the European Studbook Foundation, an independent organization of several dozens of studbook / breeding programmes of reptiles and amphibians. Boris is also a Master Herpetologist and an instructor/virtual education coordinator for the Amphibian Foundation in Alaska, GA. He has been working with reptiles and invertebrates as a hobby for many decades.

Matthew Rendle, UK

Matt has kept reptiles since childhood. Since qualifying as a Registered Veterinary Nurse (RVN), he has maintained a keen interest in exotics, including tortoises. From 2003 until 2017, he was able to pursue his interest in zoo and wildlife nursing at the Zoological Society of London’s London Zoo, where he encountered many fascinating cases. He now leads a team of 25 nurses in a busy practice in Leeds. He is chairman of the Association of Zoo and Exotic Veterinary Nurses (AZEVN) – which he co-founded in 2016 – and vice-chairman of the Veterinary Nurse Council of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons (RCVS). He regularly lectures to veterinary nurses and veterinary surgeon undergraduates at the Royal Veterinary College on topics such as herpetological husbandry, zoo and wildlife diagnostic imaging and anesthesia. He also lectures extensively on herpetology throughout Europe and America.

Tom Wells, UK

Tom has worked as a reptile keeper and a senior keeper in zoos in the UK, and has over a decade of experience of keeping reptiles privately. He has fieldwork experience in the study of reptiles and amphibians in numerous countries. Tom finished an MSc at the Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology in 2019. He completed his thesis in Bolivia, where he investigated the commercialisation and usage of chelonians. Tom manages ETA’s social media.

Jane Williams, UK

Jane has run a Chelonian welfare organisation for over 30 years, as well as teaching and writing academic courses in the fields of Chelonian welfare and husbandry and animal behaviour and training. Jane has a first degree in Zoology from the University of Nottingham, an M.A. in Education, and an M.Sc. in the care and welfare of captive Mediterranean tortoises from the University of Southampton. She is a clinical animal behaviourist and animal training instructor listed by the Animal Behaviour and Training Council (ABTC), of which she is also a Trustee. Jane is also a member of the Association of Pet Behaviour Counsellors (APBC). She is a guest lecturer at Writtle College of H & FE.

Richard Barfield, UK

Richard has been keeping Chelonia for over 23 years. During that time, as part of the Three Counties Tortoise Club, he was involved in tortoise health checks in the West Midlands and Gloucestershire twice a year, with the one-day events quite often seeing over 200 tortoises. In addition to the health checks the group also raised money to help support various chelonian related causes and developed strong links with the International Centre for the Conservation of Turtles at Allwetter Zoo, in Munster, Germany. Richard keeps and breeds several species in his collection at home and has bred a number of species for the first time in the UK.

General ETA Team

Charlotte Ducotterd, Switzerland - Advisor

Katie Mackender, UK – Membership Secretary and Bookkeeper  

Rein Wiarda, Netherlands – Book-keeper and internal accounting.

Job Stumpel, Netherlands – Veterinarian and Curator at Dierenpark Emmen, Netherlands

Contributors

Matt Goetz, Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust, Jersey

Luke Harding, UK

Gerardo Garcia, Chester Zoo, UK

Tim Skelton, UK

Ben Tapley, Zoological Society of London, UK

Peter Praschag, Turtle Island Zoo, Austria

MEETING MINUTES ARE AVAILABLE TO MEMBERS UPON REQUEST.