Mass sloth deaths prompt US bill calling for import ban

On Oct. 20, International Sloth Day, a bipartisan bill was introduced in the U.S. Congress to ban the import of wild sloths into the United States. The proposed legislation comes months after the deaths of 58 of the approximately 69 sloths imported to Sloth World, a Florida-based tourist attraction. “We owe it to these animals, and to the people in our community who spoke up, to make sure a tragedy like this never happens again,” Maxwell Alejandro Frost, a Democratic representative from Florida, said in a statement. The bill’s co-sponsor is Republican Laurel Lee. The Stopping Legalized Organized Trafficking and Harm to Sloths (SLOTHS) Act would allow limited imports of live sloths to institutions accredited by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA) for breeding purposes. Another exception would permit import of dead sloths for use in research, a press release notes. If the SLOTHS Act passes, illegal import could carry fines of up to $100,000. The push to ban sloth imports came from two Costa Rica-based NGOs, the Sloth Conservation Foundation and the Sloth Institute. When they analyzed U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service trade records, they discovered that more than 1,100 sloths were imported to the U.S. in the decade between 2011 and 2021: 100-plus sloths each year. “So, Sloth World is the biggest example of one owner importing a lot of sloths and then, of course, basically all of them dying, but it’s just not the only example,” Sam Trull, Sloth Institute co-founder and executive director, told Mongabay…This article was originally published on Mongabay