Safe and relished — in its place
Bell pepper is one of those foods tortoises greet with unusual enthusiasm: bright colour, crisp flesh, a sweet smell — many will cross the enclosure for it. It is genuinely safe for the grazing species kept as pets, and there is nothing wrong with that enthusiasm being used. The caution is nutritional shape rather than safety: pepper is a soft, relatively sugary fruit-vegetable, and a tortoise's digestion is a slow fermentation system built around coarse fibre. Peppers can garnish that system; they cannot run it.
What pepper offers and what it lacks
On the credit side, bell peppers bring vitamin C, other useful vitamins, and a good deal of moisture in a form tortoises willingly eat — helpful for hydration on hot days and for tempting food into a reluctant feeder. On the other side, they bring little fibre and less calcium than the weeds and grasses that should form the bulk of the diet, and the sweeter ripe colours carry sugars a grazing tortoise would rarely meet in quantity in the wild. Weighed honestly, pepper is a nutritious treat — better than many — but a treat by volume all the same.
Serving it well
Wash the pepper, take out the stalk and the core, and chop the flesh into pieces your tortoise can bite through; the seeds pass harmlessly, but the core is tidier removed. Any colour works — green is the least ripe and least sweet, red the ripest and sweetest — and mixing colours through chopped leafy food spreads the interest across the bowl. A small handful of pieces, a couple of times a week at most, is the right scale for most keepers. Keep hot peppers of every kind out entirely: the compounds that make them hot are an irritant a tortoise has no way to deal with.
Keeping a favourite occasional
The trap with a beloved food is the person holding it: a tortoise that begs effectively gets pepper daily, and the diet quietly recentres on the soft and sweet. Write the treat into the plan instead — pepper days decided in advance, quantities set, and the grazing pile of weeds and grass always down first. That way the enthusiasm works for you, drawing the tortoise to the bowl where the serious food also waits. KinsLe's Care Teams are where those pepper days belong, noted in the feeding duties so everyone serving knows today is — or is not — a pepper day.