[Ozric Jonathan]

Personally I don't think that a tortoise such as a hermanns has a in-built 'need' to hibernate unless conditions require it.

If the tortoise has been hibernated before then it might be difficult to make it stay up with artificial heat and light and even if owners wanted to keep such torts up it can be a struggle to do it.

I believe that younger ones are not primed for hibernation and can be easily kept up with additional heat and light. Small ones are not a challenge to look after indoors even for months on end.

Bigger and older tortoises can be a challenge to care for in the winter due to the amount of space that they need for a good quality of life.

Tortoises living outdoors will pick up all those cues from nature that signal a coming winter, and this can lead to them slowing down and once they have slowed to a certain degree you maybe could say that they now 'need' to go into hibernation.

As we know, a reptile needs heat for its bodily functions to operate properly. The lack of heat means the tortoise goes into a torpor. Some tortoises have evolved the means to survive adverse conditions by slowing all these processes right down. But they do it to survive and if the adverse conditions do not take place there is no need for them to do it.

What I personally do is "some hibernating". The main reason I do that is that I've got 10 tortoises and even though my enclosures are really quite big I don't think they can all have a great quality of life indoors for such a long period of time.