Close encounters: Sloth craze creeps into Port Clinton

PORT CLINTON — Standing in an uncomfortably warm and humid room, Kelsey Keller grabbed a zucchini slice from a bucket and waved it around.

Slowly, even more slowly than one would think, Cayenne the sloth rose to attention. One groggy-looking limb at a time, she reached out of her wooden perch and toward a tree branch. Over the next minute, Cayenne climbed down the branch until she was comfortably hanging upside down from the lowest branch.

Cayenne reached out one of her two-pronged hands in hopes of snatching the zucchini slice. Keller, the director of the African Safari Wildlife Park, located at 267 S. Lightner Rd. in Port Clinton, pulled the zucchini away and half-jokingly rebuked the sloth’s greed. Once Cayenne wrapped her hand back around the branch, Keller placed the tip of the zucchini in her mouth and then let the sloth do the rest of the work.

Over the next 10 minutes or so, she and I fed a steady diet of sliced carrots and zucchini while a red-footed tortoise indigenous to the same region circled our feet.

With a month of training from the zookeeping staff and two-weeks of experience with real-life visitors, Cayenne is well-trained. However, the process took some time to ensure that she would behave.

“We wanted to make sure that she was comfortable with the number of guests that were going to come in there,” Keller said. “We wanted to make sure that she was comfortable eating for us and coming down to meet guests on her terms.”

The experience, which the park is calling the Sloth Encounter, is a seasonal attraction running through Oct. 6 and costs $30 for 20 minutes in the encounter. In the first few weeks of the attraction, Keller has already seen great excitement about sloths.

That corresponds with a growing love of sloths over the last decade or so, as internet users watch videos of sloths moving at their own endearing pace.

Elliot Zirulnik, the park’s advancement manager, said that the public had been clamoring for a sloth encounter for a long time, but it took some time to prepare.

“Our guests have been asking us for many years if we could bring a sloth to the park,” he said. “Sloths are pretty popular animals. But it wasn’t something that we wanted to rush into. We wanted to take our time and make sure that we built a home that could meet and exceed all the sloths’ needs.”

Beyond its wide appeal, sloths also allow the park to deliver important educational messages to visitors as well, Keller added.

“Sloths are a very unique species,” she said. “They give us a lot of opportunities to talk about habitat destruction and conservation messaging with guests because they come from a very important region of the world.”

She talked about the several aspects that make the Amazon area, two-toed sloth’s natural habitat, such a critical biosphere: namely, its role in absorbing carbon dioxide, housing several endangered species, and providing food for people across the globe.

Regarding the actual encounter itself, however, Keller highlighted the need for some amount of caution. Despite an appearance that some people find cute, sloths recoil and respond poorly to the human touch. As such, the park has settled on feeding, and not petting, as the appropriate form of engagement.

“These animals are wild animals and they are not pets,” Keller said. “We want to encourage people to understand that they are here for you to learn from and experience, and not cuddle like they are your child.”

However, interactions with the animals are a priority for the park. In addition to Cayenne, there is also currently a capybara encounter as part of a broader South American theme this season.

Even beyond special attractions, there are permanent parts of the zoo that are designed to give visitors a chance to get up close with the animals. These include sticks of bird feed, camel rides, and food for other animals like giraffes.

“I think that getting to know an animal in a more up-close context strengthens your emotional connection to that individual but also to the species,”  Zirulnik said. “That has been proven to inspire people to take action to protect those animals and wildlife around the world.”