![]() One of their favorite foods is reportedly hibiscus flowers, which have also become a popular ingredient in human food culture. Their digestive systems may take an unusually long time to process food, though there’s some debate about that. ![]() It’s one of the reasons they are so slow-their diet is low-energy, so their metabolic rate is slow, too. Just as Michael Pollan advises, sloths eat mostly plants. This may have reached its zenith with the Great Sloth Meltdown of 2012, when the actress Kristen Bell shared on The Ellen Show the story of just how excited she was to meet a real, live sloth: (There are actually two distinct types of sloths, two- and three-toed, which are less closely related than was originally assumed, but since both move slowly, they are lumped together, even today.) As late as the 19th century, one natural history book describes sloths as “imperfect monsters of creation, equally remarkable in their disgusting appearance and helpless condition.”īut in our time, the reputation of sloths has been rehabilitated. They were described as having human faces, so artists depicted them as a sort of fuzzy bear with an ape-like head. Frei André Thevet/Public domainįrom their early encounters with sloths, Europeans did not think much of these creatures. This is what Europeans thought sloths looked like. Locals, he reported, called the animal “hay” after the sound it made, and because it moved so slowly, the Portuguese called it “preguiça.” That might translate as “laziness,” but, being a cleric, Purchas translated the word as as “sloth,” one of the seven deadly sins. Though he had not been to the Americas himself, he first described the sloth, which is native to Central and South America, in his book, Pilgrimage. Samuel Purchas, an English cleric, collected sailors’ reports of sights from their voyages around the world. In 1613, the sloth received its English name from a man who’d never seen the animal in the flesh.
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