Cute Baby Sloths Learn To Climb

Using rocking chairs to mimic the emotional trees. These rescue baby sloths are relearning how to climb.
The Toucan Rescue Ranch in Costa Rica is a sanctuary for all wild animals but they specialize in rescuing and rehabilitating birds and sloths. Releasing them back into the world once they are able to survive.
So the sloths in the video were rescued.

They were found as babies, orphans.
Their mothers were either killed by dogs or hit by cars. So, they are now being cared for by Leslie who runs the Toucan Rescue Ranch.

Lucy Cooke is a zoologist, writer, broadcaster and photographer who worked extensively with sloths. Making documentaries, writing books, running the cloth appreciation society and producing a sloth calendar every year.

So I was out in Coast Rica taking photos for my sloth calendar and I was particularly charmed by the Toucan Rescue Ranch and this kind of novel method that they have for teaching sloths how to climb. It’s very important if you are the cloth that you know how to climb a tree, it is pretty fundamental to being a sloth in fact. If she puts the slots during the day on her veranda on rocking chairs and then they climb up the rocking chair and they learn how to climb and the rocking chain's stops rocking and moving and that’s why it’s such a brilliant ways to teach them how to climb because it mimic's the moments of a tree. So it gets them used to some thing that’s not entirely stable.

During her stay, Lucy has come to know the baby sloths and their personalities. They are two Bradypus sloths, they are the 3 fingered sloths. And they are both sorts of five or six months old. There is Marley who is named after Bob ‘cause he is such a little mellow little baby sloth. And there is Bella. And Marley, in particular, has a bit of a cunning trick that he does when he is on the rocking chair.

So all the other sloths sort of climb to the top or clamber around. But Marley climbs to the bottom of the rocking chair and rocks himself to sleep down there. So, he is not really doing a whole lot of exercise, he is doing a lot more resting. And then there is also Mocha and Latte. And they are two-toed sloths.

Mocha is an extraordinary sloth because he just looks like a fuzzy bear. I mean he is sort of insanely cute. And what’s interesting is he is really aggressive. And so he and Latte are just fighting all the time. And there is a lot of people out there who quite like to have a sloth as a pet and you really wouldn’t want to have one as a pet because of Mocha, for instance, looks really cute but he is really aggressive and he likes to bite. So yeah, it is not appropriate.

As a zoologist, I like their eccentrics bloggy but I think you can not resist an animal that was born to hug and has a natural smile.