“I believe Isaac became addicted to sloth trafficking"

January 24, 2022 6:07 AM

A notorious sloth cartel kingpin vanished. I will admit that the headline is what hooked me, but the article is very worth a read - SLNatGeo story about how the pet and tourist trade is damaging the sloth population in Colombia and fuelling criminal cartel activity.
posted by Megami (10 comments total)

(also, I'm trying to put my email address in to be able to read the article, but no dice)
posted by Halloween Jack at 6:35 AM on January 24, 2022

Who called them sloth sellers and not slothmongers?
posted by acb at 6:40 AM on January 24, 2022 [3 favorites]

Also, given the demand for pet sloths by ignorant tourists who have no idea of what sloths are like, perhaps it's time for a programme to breed domesticable sloths, in the way that the Siberian fox breeding experiment produced domesticated foxes.
posted by acb at 7:01 AM on January 24, 2022

The first paragraph seems promising, but this website has invasive email-harvesting paywall pop-ups for me even with uBlock Origin running and using the Internet Archive.
posted by All Might Be Well at 7:02 AM on January 24, 2022 [1 favorite]

Were the sloths debauched?
posted by The corpse in the library at 7:02 AM on January 24, 2022 [4 favorites]

First, the fox domestication program is not actually domesticating foxes. Second, I was just talking about my veterinarian brother-in-law who owned a sloth! The sloth's name was Speedy and he was not a great pet. My BIL has worked for zoos, is experienced with exotics, and lives in a warm humid climate, and still Speedy did not have the environment he needed. He died before his time, and was mourned by those who should have known better.
posted by Lawn Beaver at 7:07 AM on January 24, 2022 [4 favorites]

There are two species of sloths, both targeted for the pet trade. Three-toed sloths are gentler and in greater demand than two-toed sloths, which can be “rabid and furious,” Plese says. To make them easier to handle, poachers often pull out their teeth and cut back their long nails—sometimes so roughly that they sever their fingertips.

Sloths are uniquely adapted to live, eat, sleep, mate, and raise their young in the canopies of trees in tropical rainforests across Central and South America. The flower-like clusters of broad, rounded leaves of Cecropias, for example, form a crucial part of sloths’ diets. They’re fragile creatures, experts say, that don’t easily get over the trauma of being plucked from their treetop homes, kept in cages, and fed the wrong food.

“They all come very hungry, very thirsty, very exhausted, and very depressed,” Plese says of sloths brought to her sanctuary. “For every one that has come here, three have died. Sometimes they come here to die in peace.”

Completely without irony: the irreversible damage that "cute animal videos" and YouTube/social media in general has done to the natural world is something we're going to be living with for a long time. And the worst part about it is that we can only deal with the side effects of the problem (trafficking, illegal pet trades, puppy/kitten mills) and not the source (rich people wanting cute shit they see on the internet).

These poor, gentle animals.
posted by fight or flight at 7:13 AM on January 24, 2022 [13 favorites]

I’m not a fan of any kind of exotic pet (cats and dogs are plenty exotic if you try to figure out what they are thinking), but sloths? I am having a hard time getting my head around all the things I would need to provide to keep sloths happy, but I am betting that includes “tall trees with lots of specific foliage,” which would certainly cut into my having-a-pet experience. You can’t walk them, they won’t cuddle, they don’t want to be near you, leave them alone!

Also, sloths aren’t that gentle. I remember Gerald Durrell recounting a sloth escaping from a cage. It ripped his trousers from hip to cuff, narrowly missing tearing open his leg and made a credible effort to a) bite him to death and b) topple him into the poisonous snake cages (although most sloths probably don’t have access to the latter). In short, they are wild animals with means of defense (probably even if mutilated by sloth merchants).
posted by GenjiandProust at 7:26 AM on January 24, 2022 [1 favorite]

Also, sloths aren’t that gentle.

I've been trying to find the "Fucked with the sloth, dint'cha?" story online, but it seems it's been reduced to a few screenshotted images that now mostly come up 404.

(It does not involve sexual congress with a sloth. Also, it's an Army story, so it may have been a tall tale to begin with.)
posted by Pallas Athena at 8:15 AM on January 24, 2022 [1 favorite]

"A notorious sloth cartel kingpin vanished" For some reason this made me think of Jabba the Hut. A Hut is slow, but that doesn't make him a sloth.
posted by eye of newt at 9:48 AM on January 24, 2022