Posted by Lucy Cooke, lunatic for love of bizarre animals, National Geographic Explorer, and founder of the Sloth Appreciation Society has a valentine for the world.
It is a bucket of sloths. You can see it above.
Most of the Internet-viewing world finds this heart-meltingly adorable. I on the other hand am freaked out by sloths and see this as roughly comparable to a portable version of the terrifying toothed and tentacled pit that nearly devoured Han Solo.
Still, earlier today I found the fortitude to watch the video and then talk to Lucy about it, because that literally is my job. Here’s what she had to say:
Why, Lucy, are these sloths in a bucket?
It’s the easiest way to transport a bunch of sleepy babies. You’d be waiting all day if you tried to get them to move without the bucket.
Are there other vessels that are good for sloths?
[At the Aviarios del Caribe sloth sanctuary in Costa Rica] they have 150 [sloths]. One lives in a hanging basket… you finding them in cooking pots…
Cooking pots?
Not to eat.
Thanks for that. Why not just carry them in your arms?
If you try to pick up six of them, they have a tendency to cling. Their arms are hooks. They stick like Velcro.
That makes me think of the game “A Barrel of Monkeys” where you use one flat plastic chimp to try to pick up a whole chain of them…
It would work very well with sloths. They’d be ideal for it.
Well folks, I can’t imagine “A Barrel of Sloths” will be hitting stores any time soon, but Lucy Cooke’s “A Little Book of Sloth” is available March 5, 2013. In the meantime get all the slothness you can handle from Lucy at slothville.com. I’m going to go find some pictures of kittens.
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Lucy Cooke, NG Emerging Explorer
Aviarios del Caribe Sloth Sanctuary
February 16, 6:51 am
February 15, 9:43 pm
