Two leading experts on sloths are recommending steps Florida can take to protect the fragile wild animals. This comes after the deaths of 56 sloths brought to Orlando for the failed Sloth World attraction.
Officials at the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission are reviewing those recommendations, which include a ban on the importation of wild sloths. Last month, Florida paused the importing of sloths after the Sloth World deaths became public.
Sam Trull, executive director and co-founder of the Sloth Institute, and Rebecca Cliffe, founder and director of the Sloth Conservation Foundation, said they're seizing the moment to highlight the unique vulnerability of sloths and the need to protect them. Their organizations are based in Costa Rica.
"This is not new information to us," Trull said during a joint interview over Zoom on Tuesday. "But finally the public is paying attention. Finally, lawmakers are paying attention. Finally, people see it as a problem, as well, and so, you know, we've been preparing for this moment, like our entire careers."
Cliffe said FWC sent her an email Tuesday seeking to schedule a follow-up meeting.
"Everything we've learned through the FWC so far is that they seem to be very open to these ideas," she said.
Florida classifies captive animals based on the danger they pose to humans, Cliffe said. "[T]here's no classification there for the danger that we pose to the animal, and sloths are kind of a really good flagship species for that issue, because ... you know the threat that we pose to them is enormous."
State Rep. Anna Eskamani, D-Orlando, said in an email that she joined the experts in sending the recommendations to FWC.
"The Sloth World deaths weren't a one-off failure," Eskamani said, "they were a warning about a system that simply isn't built to protect these animals."
A sensitive, fragile species
The two sloth conservation organizations combined forces as the "Sloth Protection Alliance" in drafting the three-page report with recommendations. It emphasizes the particularly fragile biology of wild sloths.
"Sloths are not well-suited to commercial handling, public encounters, or private ownership," the document states. "They are highly specialized rainforest mammals with very specific biological and welfare needs that are difficult to meet in transport and in captivity."
Sloths are "extremely sensitive to stress," they wrote, but the animals don't show it outwardly "and even when experiencing severe physiological stress or illness, they can appear calm and inactive, making problems difficult to detect."
They have a specific diet of rainforest leaves, the report states. "Sudden dietary changes, such as those that occur when sloths are removed from the wild and transported into the United States, lead to high mortality. Their extremely slow metabolism also means that illness and decline can take weeks to become visible, by which point the damage is often already irreversible."
Sloths can't regulate their body temperatures very well and "rely on very narrow temperature and humidity ranges to survive." Maintaining those conditions in transport and captivity isn't easy.
Finally, the report says that sloths live longer than 50 years in the wild. But in captivity, even in the best zoo conditions, they average only 13–20 years.
The recommendations
For all those reasons, the report says they need specialized regulations and oversight. The Sloth Protection Alliance proposes five policy changes:
- Impose a ban on the importation of wild-caught sloths.
- Lift sloths out of the general Class III category for captive wildlife and create specific regulations. They would include qualifications for permit-holders, inspections by specially trained personnel, a sloth-specific veterinary care plan, environmental standards regulating temperature and humidity, comprehensive record keeping, and traceable identification enabling FWC to track sloths throughout their lives.
- Require mandatory reporting of sloth deaths, births, sales and transfers.
- Prohibit direct-contact sloth encounter experiences. That's not meant to exclude viewing and feeding without physical contact, like people do at a zoo. The hands-on sloth encounter experiences are "fueling the demand for wild sloths, Cliffe said. "They hate the sensation of being stroked and touched because it's not in their biology. The mother sloth would never stroke its baby, you know. Stroking is a very human thing, and so they just hate it."
- Finally, make sure that sloths born to females imported while pregnant don't automatically qualify as captive-bred animals.
The survivors
The report says an analysis of FWC reports shows 76 sloths were brought to Orlando for Sloth World, an attraction planned for International Drive that never actually opened. Fifty-six of those animals died. Eleven remain unaccounted for.
Nine are recovering at the Central Florida Zoo and Botanical Gardens in Sanford.
At the zoo, veterinarian Haley Straub said they're happy with how the sloths are doing. But she said the animals -- which are still in quarantine -- are "very, very sensitive creatures" with extremely slow digestive systems.
"So even though they've been with us for 46 days," she said, "the reason why none of them are fully out of the woods yet is because they've only been with us for 46 days."
The zoo originally received 13 sloths from Sloth World, but four of them did not survive.
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