Thirty-one sloths are dead. Thirteen more are fighting for their lives in emergency veterinary care. And no one has faced any legal consequences.

That is the devastating reality of Sloth World, a Florida attraction that imported at least 69 wild-caught sloths from South America — including from Peru and Guyana — to be used as entertainment. The facility has now permanently shut down following an investigation led by The Sloth Conservation Foundation and The Sloth Institute, but the damage cannot be undone. The 13 surviving sloths can never return to the wild. Many are in poor health, their origins are unclear, and some may live in captivity for the rest of their lives — sloths can live more than 50 years.

What is perhaps most shocking is that all of this was legal.

Under current U.S. law, there are no federal protections strong enough to stop businesses from importing wild-caught sloths and putting them on display for profit. There is no requirement to report animal deaths. There are no meaningful penalties for the kind of suffering documented at Sloth World. Two foreign nonprofit organizations had to run an independent campaign to shut this facility down — because U.S. law didn't do it.

"Sloth World is an egregious example of the damaging effects of the sloth trade on the welfare and conservation of sloths, but every individual taken from the wild for entertainment is a tragedy," said Sam Trull of The Sloth Institute.

Sloth World is not an isolated case. It is a symptom of a broken system — one with weak regulations, gaping enforcement loopholes, and no real deterrent for those who profit from taking animals out of the wild. As long as the commercial trade of wild-caught sloths remains legal in the United States, this will happen again.

We are calling on the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Congress to act now: ban the import and commercial trade of wild-caught sloths, strengthen federal protections to close the loopholes that made Sloth World possible, and establish mandatory reporting requirements for exotic animal facilities so that deaths like these can never be hidden again.

Thirty-one sloths died. Twenty-four more are still unaccounted for. Sign this petition to make sure their suffering is not in vain.