Thirty-one wild sloths are dead. They were imported from the forest canopies of Guyana and Peru and placed in a warehouse in Orlando that had no running water, no electricity, and space heaters that kept tripping the fuse and shutting off. At least one night in December 2024, they were left alone in the cold without heat. One by one, they died. When a second shipment of ten sloths arrived from Peru in February 2025, two were dead on arrival and the rest were emaciated. None survived.

Sloth World kept importing more sloths. The deaths kept mounting.

A novel gammaherpesvirus began spreading through the warehouse. Necropsy reports described systemic stress as a definitive catalyst for the deaths. A nine-month-old baby named Kiwi weighed less than three pounds when she died. The founder of the Sloth Conservation Foundation said there is no justification in 2026 for acquiring wild sloths for exhibition. The executive director of The Sloth Institute called what Sloth World is doing mindblowing in scale and described its conservation marketing as strategic deception. Sloth World's owner called the documented deaths completely fiction.

Throughout all of this, Sloth World was operating without a USDA license, which is required before any facility displays animals to the public. The USDA confirmed this in March 2026. Sloth World's related import business also lacked a USDA license as of April 2026. The agency knew about the facility. It did not shut it down. Florida Fish and Wildlife gave Sloth World a verbal warning for housing sloths in cages too small for them, then told Inside Climate News there are currently no active investigations.

The regulatory failure here is as significant as the cruelty. Wild animals were imported, housed in unlicensed facilities, and allowed to die while government agencies issued verbal warnings and moved on. The system that was supposed to prevent this did not prevent it. It did not even slow it down.

The conservation branding made it worse. Sloth World marketed itself as the planet's only Slotharium where sloths live their slowest, happiest lives. It listed the USDA and Florida Fish and Wildlife as animal welfare partners. The USDA said it is not a partner and does not designate facilities that way. Sloth World claimed a research collaboration with the University of Florida. The university said it has no official or legal partnership with Sloth World. These are not misunderstandings. They are deliberate misrepresentations designed to make commercial wildlife exploitation look like conservation. And they worked well enough to allow Sloth World to import at least 69 wild sloths while marketing $49 animal encounter tickets to the public.

Sloths evolved over millions of years as biological introverts. They lack a fight-or-flight response and internalize stress silently, sometimes curling into a ball and closing their eyes while their bodies flood with cortisol and their organs fail. The stillness that makes them look cute on social media is often the mask of an animal in extreme distress. There is no version of that reality that constitutes conservation.

Sign this petition to demand Florida and federal authorities immediately shut down Sloth World and halt any further importation of wild sloths to the facility, require the USDA to enforce its licensing requirements and conduct pre-importation inspections before any exotic animal facility can receive wild animals, and establish federal truth-in-advertising standards prohibiting commercial animal attractions from falsely claiming conservation partnerships or research collaborations.