Near Portland, there is a place where you can spend a night in a room full of sloths.
It's in a gated compound. We pulled up, turned on the car light, and filled out waivers. Did we work with or donate to any animal welfare organizations? Were we affiliated with any newspapers, web sites, blogs, or other media outlets?
My friend Jaclyn had a significant birthday this year, and her partner, Jason, planned a road trip for her. He told her to bring a passport and clothes for a humid climate. She was surprised to find herself flying to Portland, surprised to find three friends waiting for her in a restaurant, surprised to find herself driving out into rural Oregon the next day, and probably surprised to find herself spending a night with sloths. On the drive out, in darkness, on misty, winding roads, her guesses grew worried: "Is it an all-night escape room? Is it... a haunted railroad car?"
A little before 7PM, the gate swung open and a young volunteer came out to meet us, with a baby raccoon named Omen and a suicidal Alsatian named Marius. We passed over the waivers and a wad of cash and pulled up to park in front of a garage, Marius running in front of the car but mis-timing his attempt. The volunteer was a young student, kind and vacant, like a low-ranking UFO cultist. She explained how the night was going to work, which we were all a bit nervous about.
This operation is a sort of animal sanctuary, with fifty or so species scattered across a large compound. Our deal was to spend a night with its sloths. It has a startling number of them – did she really say 356? – but nine, nine "ambassador sloths", were set apart in a little building near the house, where they handled outreach, fundraising, and educational duties.
This was a garage-like building with four dome-shaped jungle gyms bolted to the ceiling, double-width milk crates attached to the walls, and a powerful Hot Dawg-brand heater that kept the temperature somewhere near tropical levels. In each corner was a cot-tent. Hanging from the jungle gyms, lying in the swings, and curled up in the crates, were the nine sloths. They're about – what? – a metre long, with poles for arms, hooks for hands, brown marbles for eyes, and a covering of coarse blonde Hallowe'en-wig hair. They were (I think) Linnaeus's two-toed sloths, native to South America.
On the mini-fridge at one end of the room was a big steel bowl full of pieces of cucumber, which we fed to the sloths.
There's an obvious worry with having a lot of animals directly overhead, but, in fact, sloths come to the ground to urinate and defecate. And they do that only once every few days. In the wild, they apparently make the trip once a week or so, losing up to a third of their body weight and burying the mess. No one's quite sure why they do things this way, because quite a few of them get killed by jaguars and ocelots on these bathroom runs; there are theories that it has something to do with the communities of insects and fungi that live on them in the wild. Or maybe it has to do with some pressure that no longer exists, like pronghorns' speed, or the way I still wear pants even though I work at home.
Apart from feeding them and petting them – with the palm of the hand only, because the fingertips feel too much like claws or talons – there isn't a lot to do with sloths. They do not play. They do not fetch things. They are not affectionate. They do not make much noise. They respond well to cucumber-related stimuli; but they don't otherwise take an active interest in the world. They hang where they are, they move around a little, they scratch their groins thoughtfully ("that means they're comfortable around you"). One may stare at you, and you can choose to feel that you've made some sort of emotional connection with it, but then a "NOT FOOD" sign will wink on in the low light of its mind and it will look slowly away.
They're adapted to a low-energy diet; I guess you don't evolve a low body temperature and an ultra-low-activity lifestyle and then also end up with a high-voltage brain blazing with impulses and emotions. They eat and scratch. Once a week, they take a harrowing trip to the ground to conduct eliminative business on an astounding scale. Otherwise, they hang out waiting to be picked off by harpy eagles. Then again, here they were, relaxing while 5 humans with 11 university degrees put food directly into their mouths, so maybe no one really gets to feel smug.
The bowl of cucumber sat on top of a mini-fridge throughout the night. The sloths made no effort to raid it. They do not plan heists.
At one end of the room was a TV showing nature documentaries. At the other, a heater was mounted up near the ceiling. The heater switched on and off. As the room cooled, the sloths would sink into a sort of torpor. When it came on, they would go bananas, by sloth standards, by which I mean they'd start creeping about a bit or napping with extra zest. Sometimes, a pair would meet and start licking each other's faces. Usually, one would climb directly on top of the heater and curl up there. Other pairs would let themselves down into the swings for a well-earned rest.
There was a powerful sloth smell in the place. It's hard to describe; a clean, farmyard smell, but a sloth farm. It's not awful, but it's a heavy smell, a weird sloth miasma that sinks into your clothes. Everything we wore reeked of it afterwards, and nothing I wore among the sloths could be worn for the rest of the trip. Even now, my backpack reminds me strongly of the experience. This is something Proust would have written about, if he'd spent more time with sloths.
Omen the juvenile raccoon was not a good fit in the sloth room. It climbed up high, annoyed a sloth, and demanded to be rescued. Then, it climbed up high, annoyed a sloth, and demanded to be rescued. Then, it started to climb, and a woman in hot pants came to the door and took it away. Our volunteer promised us a visit from a "mystery animal" in the morning, to make up for not having a hyperactive raccoon to deal with throughout the night.
Our volunteer (who was professional and quite nice and probably deserves better treatment than she's getting here) came in and went out, asking at random moments if we had any questions and providing interesting and dubious facts about sloths. "Because of deforestation, we estimate they will be extinct in the wild in two or three years" (IUCN Red List: Choloepus didactylus is listed as Least Concern in view of its wide distribution, presumed large population, its occurrence in a number of protected areas, and because it is unlikely to be declining fast enough to qualify for listing in a threatened category... There are no major threats to C. didactylus.)
That sort of raises the question of what this operation is all about. The sloths aren't just rescues, they're being bred; one of the nine was pregnant. It feels like something that snowballed: you rescue one sloth, you rescue a few more sloths, the sloths have a couple of babies, you look up the cost of flying a sloth to Brazil, and, feeling the terrible momentum of the thing, you focus on convincing yourself that it's all very, very important somehow, and on suppressing the thought that a greater net reduction in animal suffering could be achieved by eating a bit less meat and feeding the sloths through a jet engine. The volunteer sort of bore this out: the organization's founder was backpacking through South America when she found an abandoned baby sloth and took it with her, and then...
It's not really the place of someone who writes a travel blog to criticize anyone else for doing pointless things. The place seemed clean and humane, and had not-for-profit status. At the same time, its claims about scientific research and conservation are a bit doubtful, it does seem to sell other animals (probably not sloths) to other centres and to private collectors, and it funds itself in part by bringing in gawkers like myself for expensive hangout sessions with wild animals. Beyond that, it's a mystery exactly what it does, and why.
The sloth breeding, especially, seems odd. Sloths live a long time in captivity. One of the ones we fed was 38, and is, as far as anyone knows, the oldest living sloth in the world (a 40-year-old sloth in Australia recently died, or has become unusually thoughtful). Is there some kind of Malthusian sloth crisis on the horizon? Will they overrun the Pacific Northwest like a smelly, slow-moving locust swarm? How long before the rest of the world follows? We'd know more if the people at the Doomsday Clock would return my calls. Certainly, it's a cooler way for the world to end than most of the obvious possibilities. Imagine all the glum aliens tearing up betting slips that say "nuclear war", "gray goo", "gamma ray burst", and one lucky idiot dancing a jig and waving one that says "slothocalypse".
The tents were there for us to sleep in, "if we decided we wanted to sleep". It's hard to imagine that people come here and don't sleep. After a few hours, you understand that the sloths have pretty much exhausted their repertoire. They aren't building to a big musical number, or anything like that. We packed it in pretty early. I got into a tent, expecting the night to be competitive with my worst nights' sleep ever. The sloths came down and crawled along the outside of it, weird upside-down silhouettes moving slowly past.
For whatever reason, I slept amazingly well. I got up in the early morning, but that was mostly a question of jet lag. It was dark out, and everyone else was still asleep. The sloths were excited to see me, relatively speaking. They hadn't had a sniff of cucumber in hours, and a bit of a feeding frenzy got underway, with four or five of them making their way over to be fed. To get closer, they'd let go with their hands and dangle by their feet. I'd attend to one and find another had dropped silently down behind me like a slo-mo ninja. It was all absolutely quiet except for contented chomping. Should I grab a sloth and take off in the car? They would have made that movie in the 70s.
We had to get out by about seven. By 6:30, everyone was up, and our volunteer disappeared for a few minutes and returned with our mystery animal: a common brown lemur, which clung to her with its nervous head resting on her shoulder. She'd advised us to wear long sleeves. She herself wore a raincoat, but reassured us that it "had just gone". She gave us each a few Froot Loops, sat on the floor, and turned so it faced one of us and then another. The lemur accepted pieces of cereal, looked around inquisitively, and made little noises like a squeaky toy. Outside, dogs were howling; there was a kennel of Rottweilers nearby, and they were howling along with some wolves who were somewhere else on the property.
On the way out, we collected our free commemorative t-shirts, which say "I slept with a sloth" on the front and have a picture of a sloth on the back (the designer used a 3-toed sloth, which the centre doesn't have and which can't be kept in captivity). Mine is purple, and is on track to become the least-worn article of clothing I've ever owned. I've been trying to think of occasions when it would be suitable, and have come up with nothing. If there ever is anything for which it seems appropriate, I probably won't go.
We pulled out and headed to Olympic National Park, hitting a Starbucks on the way to share our sloth stench with some locals.
General comments:
- This was a very strange experience.
- I enjoyed it.
- I thought the ambassador sloths would be dressier.
It's in a gated compound. We pulled up, turned on the car light, and filled out waivers. Did we work with or donate to any animal welfare organizations? Were we affiliated with any newspapers, web sites, blogs, or other media outlets?
My friend Jaclyn had a significant birthday this year, and her partner, Jason, planned a road trip for her. He told her to bring a passport and clothes for a humid climate. She was surprised to find herself flying to Portland, surprised to find three friends waiting for her in a restaurant, surprised to find herself driving out into rural Oregon the next day, and probably surprised to find herself spending a night with sloths. On the drive out, in darkness, on misty, winding roads, her guesses grew worried: "Is it an all-night escape room? Is it... a haunted railroad car?"
A little before 7PM, the gate swung open and a young volunteer came out to meet us, with a baby raccoon named Omen and a suicidal Alsatian named Marius. We passed over the waivers and a wad of cash and pulled up to park in front of a garage, Marius running in front of the car but mis-timing his attempt. The volunteer was a young student, kind and vacant, like a low-ranking UFO cultist. She explained how the night was going to work, which we were all a bit nervous about.
All photos by Jay L. Jay, a skilled sloth photographer, is available for sloth portraits and sloth gatherings of all kinds.
This operation is a sort of animal sanctuary, with fifty or so species scattered across a large compound. Our deal was to spend a night with its sloths. It has a startling number of them – did she really say 356? – but nine, nine "ambassador sloths", were set apart in a little building near the house, where they handled outreach, fundraising, and educational duties.
This was a garage-like building with four dome-shaped jungle gyms bolted to the ceiling, double-width milk crates attached to the walls, and a powerful Hot Dawg-brand heater that kept the temperature somewhere near tropical levels. In each corner was a cot-tent. Hanging from the jungle gyms, lying in the swings, and curled up in the crates, were the nine sloths. They're about – what? – a metre long, with poles for arms, hooks for hands, brown marbles for eyes, and a covering of coarse blonde Hallowe'en-wig hair. They were (I think) Linnaeus's two-toed sloths, native to South America.
On the mini-fridge at one end of the room was a big steel bowl full of pieces of cucumber, which we fed to the sloths.
Sloth-feeding: a guideWhen we'd more or less mastered this, our volunteer tried to move us on to something more advanced by adding some cucumber spears (the other pieces were quartered slices). Whether through our fault or the sloths', these weren't a success. They were too hard to eat. The sloths would get about halfway through and then get discouraged, let it drop, and look exhaustedly into the distance.
Pick up your cucumber piece.
Approach your sloth.
Hold the cucumber under its nose.
If your offering is not acceptable, the sloth will not open its mouth, and you will have to go away and learn to do better.
If the sloth is interested, it will open its mouth.
Place the cucumber in the sloth's mouth like a communion wafer.
The sloth will pause a moment, probably in hopes that someone else will chew for it, and then start champing with a resigned "I guess I have to do everything around here" sort of attitude.
If your cucumber placement is faulty, the sloth will slowly, slowly swing a claw up and nudge the cucumber into its mouth. If it weren't too much effort, it would sigh while doing this.
When the sloth is finished, it will hang still. This means it wants more cucumber, or does not want more cucumber, or is sleepy, or has died.
There's an obvious worry with having a lot of animals directly overhead, but, in fact, sloths come to the ground to urinate and defecate. And they do that only once every few days. In the wild, they apparently make the trip once a week or so, losing up to a third of their body weight and burying the mess. No one's quite sure why they do things this way, because quite a few of them get killed by jaguars and ocelots on these bathroom runs; there are theories that it has something to do with the communities of insects and fungi that live on them in the wild. Or maybe it has to do with some pressure that no longer exists, like pronghorns' speed, or the way I still wear pants even though I work at home.
Apart from feeding them and petting them – with the palm of the hand only, because the fingertips feel too much like claws or talons – there isn't a lot to do with sloths. They do not play. They do not fetch things. They are not affectionate. They do not make much noise. They respond well to cucumber-related stimuli; but they don't otherwise take an active interest in the world. They hang where they are, they move around a little, they scratch their groins thoughtfully ("that means they're comfortable around you"). One may stare at you, and you can choose to feel that you've made some sort of emotional connection with it, but then a "NOT FOOD" sign will wink on in the low light of its mind and it will look slowly away.
They're adapted to a low-energy diet; I guess you don't evolve a low body temperature and an ultra-low-activity lifestyle and then also end up with a high-voltage brain blazing with impulses and emotions. They eat and scratch. Once a week, they take a harrowing trip to the ground to conduct eliminative business on an astounding scale. Otherwise, they hang out waiting to be picked off by harpy eagles. Then again, here they were, relaxing while 5 humans with 11 university degrees put food directly into their mouths, so maybe no one really gets to feel smug.
The bowl of cucumber sat on top of a mini-fridge throughout the night. The sloths made no effort to raid it. They do not plan heists.
At one end of the room was a TV showing nature documentaries. At the other, a heater was mounted up near the ceiling. The heater switched on and off. As the room cooled, the sloths would sink into a sort of torpor. When it came on, they would go bananas, by sloth standards, by which I mean they'd start creeping about a bit or napping with extra zest. Sometimes, a pair would meet and start licking each other's faces. Usually, one would climb directly on top of the heater and curl up there. Other pairs would let themselves down into the swings for a well-earned rest.
There was a powerful sloth smell in the place. It's hard to describe; a clean, farmyard smell, but a sloth farm. It's not awful, but it's a heavy smell, a weird sloth miasma that sinks into your clothes. Everything we wore reeked of it afterwards, and nothing I wore among the sloths could be worn for the rest of the trip. Even now, my backpack reminds me strongly of the experience. This is something Proust would have written about, if he'd spent more time with sloths.
Omen the juvenile raccoon was not a good fit in the sloth room. It climbed up high, annoyed a sloth, and demanded to be rescued. Then, it climbed up high, annoyed a sloth, and demanded to be rescued. Then, it started to climb, and a woman in hot pants came to the door and took it away. Our volunteer promised us a visit from a "mystery animal" in the morning, to make up for not having a hyperactive raccoon to deal with throughout the night.
Our volunteer (who was professional and quite nice and probably deserves better treatment than she's getting here) came in and went out, asking at random moments if we had any questions and providing interesting and dubious facts about sloths. "Because of deforestation, we estimate they will be extinct in the wild in two or three years" (IUCN Red List: Choloepus didactylus is listed as Least Concern in view of its wide distribution, presumed large population, its occurrence in a number of protected areas, and because it is unlikely to be declining fast enough to qualify for listing in a threatened category... There are no major threats to C. didactylus.)
That sort of raises the question of what this operation is all about. The sloths aren't just rescues, they're being bred; one of the nine was pregnant. It feels like something that snowballed: you rescue one sloth, you rescue a few more sloths, the sloths have a couple of babies, you look up the cost of flying a sloth to Brazil, and, feeling the terrible momentum of the thing, you focus on convincing yourself that it's all very, very important somehow, and on suppressing the thought that a greater net reduction in animal suffering could be achieved by eating a bit less meat and feeding the sloths through a jet engine. The volunteer sort of bore this out: the organization's founder was backpacking through South America when she found an abandoned baby sloth and took it with her, and then...
It's not really the place of someone who writes a travel blog to criticize anyone else for doing pointless things. The place seemed clean and humane, and had not-for-profit status. At the same time, its claims about scientific research and conservation are a bit doubtful, it does seem to sell other animals (probably not sloths) to other centres and to private collectors, and it funds itself in part by bringing in gawkers like myself for expensive hangout sessions with wild animals. Beyond that, it's a mystery exactly what it does, and why.
The sloth breeding, especially, seems odd. Sloths live a long time in captivity. One of the ones we fed was 38, and is, as far as anyone knows, the oldest living sloth in the world (a 40-year-old sloth in Australia recently died, or has become unusually thoughtful). Is there some kind of Malthusian sloth crisis on the horizon? Will they overrun the Pacific Northwest like a smelly, slow-moving locust swarm? How long before the rest of the world follows? We'd know more if the people at the Doomsday Clock would return my calls. Certainly, it's a cooler way for the world to end than most of the obvious possibilities. Imagine all the glum aliens tearing up betting slips that say "nuclear war", "gray goo", "gamma ray burst", and one lucky idiot dancing a jig and waving one that says "slothocalypse".
The tents were there for us to sleep in, "if we decided we wanted to sleep". It's hard to imagine that people come here and don't sleep. After a few hours, you understand that the sloths have pretty much exhausted their repertoire. They aren't building to a big musical number, or anything like that. We packed it in pretty early. I got into a tent, expecting the night to be competitive with my worst nights' sleep ever. The sloths came down and crawled along the outside of it, weird upside-down silhouettes moving slowly past.
For whatever reason, I slept amazingly well. I got up in the early morning, but that was mostly a question of jet lag. It was dark out, and everyone else was still asleep. The sloths were excited to see me, relatively speaking. They hadn't had a sniff of cucumber in hours, and a bit of a feeding frenzy got underway, with four or five of them making their way over to be fed. To get closer, they'd let go with their hands and dangle by their feet. I'd attend to one and find another had dropped silently down behind me like a slo-mo ninja. It was all absolutely quiet except for contented chomping. Should I grab a sloth and take off in the car? They would have made that movie in the 70s.
We had to get out by about seven. By 6:30, everyone was up, and our volunteer disappeared for a few minutes and returned with our mystery animal: a common brown lemur, which clung to her with its nervous head resting on her shoulder. She'd advised us to wear long sleeves. She herself wore a raincoat, but reassured us that it "had just gone". She gave us each a few Froot Loops, sat on the floor, and turned so it faced one of us and then another. The lemur accepted pieces of cereal, looked around inquisitively, and made little noises like a squeaky toy. Outside, dogs were howling; there was a kennel of Rottweilers nearby, and they were howling along with some wolves who were somewhere else on the property.
On the way out, we collected our free commemorative t-shirts, which say "I slept with a sloth" on the front and have a picture of a sloth on the back (the designer used a 3-toed sloth, which the centre doesn't have and which can't be kept in captivity). Mine is purple, and is on track to become the least-worn article of clothing I've ever owned. I've been trying to think of occasions when it would be suitable, and have come up with nothing. If there ever is anything for which it seems appropriate, I probably won't go.
We pulled out and headed to Olympic National Park, hitting a Starbucks on the way to share our sloth stench with some locals.
General comments:
- This was a very strange experience.
- I enjoyed it.
- I thought the ambassador sloths would be dressier.
