Zond 5 launched on 14 September 1968 and swung around the Moon before splashing down in the Indian Ocean on 21 September. The biological payload included two steppe tortoises, along with wine flies, mealworms, plants, seeds and bacteria, chosen partly because tortoises tolerate long periods without food and need little life support.
The animals were recovered alive. Reports noted they had lost roughly a tenth of their body weight, against about a twentieth in the ground controls, and investigators attributed the difference to starvation rather than to the flight itself.
The first crewed lunar flight, Apollo 8, followed in December 1968. The tortoises are correctly described as the first animals to travel around the Moon, and they were also the first terrestrial life to go beyond low Earth orbit at all: no earlier mission carried living organisms out of Earth orbit. What the flight was not is the first animal spaceflight. Animals had been flown into Earth orbit more than a decade earlier.