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The brown-throated three-toed sloth is the most common of the extant species of sloth, which inhabits the Neotropical realm in the forests of South and Central America. The pale-throated three-toed sloth, which inhabits tropical rainforests in northern South America. It is similar in appearance to, and often confused with, the brown-throated.

Sloth, (suborder Phyllophaga), tree-dwelling mammal noted for its slowness of movement. All five living species are limited to the lowland tropical forests of South and Central America, where they can be found high in the forest canopy sunning, resting, or feeding on leaves. Although two-toed sloths (family Megalonychidae) are capable of climbing and positioning themselves vertically, they spend almost all of their time hanging horizontally, using their large hooklike extremities to move along branches and vines. Three-toed sloths (family Bradypodidae) move in the same way but often sit in the forks of trees rather than hanging from branches.

What kind of animal is a sloth?

Sloths are mammals. They are part of the order Pilosa, which is also home to anteaters. Together with armadillos, sloths and anteaters form the magnorder Xenarthra.

How many types of sloths are there?

A total of five species of sloths exist: the pygmy three-toed sloth, the maned sloth, the pale-throated three-toed sloth, the brown-throated three-toed sloth, and Linnaeus's two-toed sloth. All sloths are either two-toed or three-toed.

Where do sloths live?

Sloths live in the lowland tropical areas of South and Central America. They spend most of their life in the forest canopy. Two-toed sloths tend to hang horizontally from branches, while three-toed sloths often sit in the forks of trees.

What do sloths eat?

Sloths are omnivores. Because they spend most of their time in trees, they like to munch on leaves, twigs, flowers, and other foliage, though some species may eat insects and other small animals.

Why are sloths so slow?

Sloths are slow because of their diet and metabolic rate. They eat a low-calorie diet consisting exclusively of plants, and they metabolize at a rate that is only 40–45 percent of what is expected for mammals of their weight. Sloths must move slowly to conserve energy.

Sloths have long legs, stumpy tails, and rounded heads with inconspicuous ears. Although they possess colour vision, sloths’ eyesight and hearing are not very acute; orientation is mainly by touch. The limbs are adapted for suspending the body rather than supporting it. As a result, sloths are completely helpless on the ground unless there is something to grasp. Even then, they are able only to drag themselves along with their claws. They are surprisingly good swimmers. Generally nocturnal, sloths are solitary and are aggressive toward others of the same sex.

Sloths have large multichambered stomachs and an ability to tolerate strong chemicals from the foliage they eat. The leafy food is digested slowly; a fermenting meal may take up to a week to process. The stomach is constantly filled, its contents making up about 30 percent of the sloth’s weight. Sloths descend to the ground at approximately six-day intervals to urinate and defecate (see Sidebar: A moving habitat). Physiologically, sloths are heterothermic—that is, they have imperfect control over their body temperature. Normally ranging between 25 and 35 °C (77 and 95 °F), body temperature may drop to as low as 20 °C (68 °F). At this temperature the animals become torpid. Although heterothermicity makes sloths very sensitive to temperature change, they have thick skin and are able to withstand severe injuries.

All sloths were formerly classified in the same family (Bradypodidae), but two-toed sloths have been found to be so different from three-toed sloths that they are now classified in a separate family (Megalonychidae).

Three-toed sloths

The three-toed sloth (family Bradypodidae) is also called the ai in Latin America because of the high-pitched cry it produces when agitated. All four species belong to the same genus, Bradypus, and the coloration of their short facial hair bestows them with a perpetually smiling expression. The brown-throated three-toed sloth (B. variegatus) occurs in Central and South America from Honduras to northern Argentina; the pale-throated three-toed sloth (B. tridactylus) is found in northern South America; the maned sloth (B. torquatus) is restricted to the small Atlantic forest of southeastern Brazil; and the pygmy three-toed sloth (B. pygmaeus) inhabits the Isla Escudo de Veraguas, a small Caribbean island off the northwestern coast of Panama.

Although most mammals have seven neck vertebrae, three-toed sloths have eight or nine, which permits them to turn their heads through a 270° arc. The teeth are simple pegs, and the upper front pair are smaller than the others; incisor and true canine teeth are lacking. Adults weigh only about 4 kg (8.8 pounds), and the young weigh less than 1 kg (2.2 pounds), possibly as little as 150–250 grams (about 5–9 ounces) at birth. (The birth weight of B. torquatus, for example, is only 300 grams [about 11 ounces].) The head and body length of three-toed sloths averages 58 cm (23 inches), and the tail is short, round, and movable. The forelimbs are 50 percent longer than the hind limbs; all four feet have three long, curved sharp claws. Sloths’ coloration makes them difficult to spot, even though they are very common in some areas. The outer layer of shaggy long hair is pale brown to gray and covers a short, dense coat of black-and-white underfur. The outer hairs have many cracks, perhaps caused by the algae living there. The algae give the animals a greenish tinge, especially during the rainy season. Sexes look alike in the maned sloth, but in the other species males have a large patch (speculum) in the middle of the back that lacks overhair, thus revealing the black dorsal stripe and bordering white underfur, which is sometimes stained yellow to orange. The maned sloth gets its name from the long black hair on the back of its head and neck.

Three-toed sloths, although mainly nocturnal, may be active day or night but spend only about 10 percent of their time moving at all. They sleep either perched in the fork of a tree or hanging from a branch, with all four feet bunched together and the head tucked in on the chest. In this posture the sloth resembles a clump of dead leaves, so inconspicuous that it was once thought these animals ate only the leaves of cecropia trees because in other trees it went undetected. Research has since shown that they eat the foliage of a wide variety of other trees and vines. Locating food by touch and smell, the sloth feeds by hooking a branch with its claws and pulling it to its mouth. Sloths’ slow movements and mainly nocturnal habits generally do not attract the attention of predators such as jaguars and harpy eagles. Normally, three-toed sloths are silent and docile, but if disturbed they can strike out furiously with the sharp foreclaws.

Reproduction is seasonal in the brown- and pale-throated species; the maned sloth may breed throughout the year. Reproduction in pygmy three-toed sloths, however, has not yet been observed. A single young is born after less than six months’ gestation. Newborn sloths cling to the mother’s abdomen and remain with the mother until at least five months of age. Three-toed sloths are so difficult to maintain in captivity that little is known about their breeding behaviour and other aspects of their life history.

Sloth is one of the seven capital sins in Catholic teachings. It is the most difficult sin to define and credit as sin, since it refers to an assortment of ideas, dating from antiquity and including mental, spiritual, pathological, and physical states.^[1] One definition is a habitual disinclination to exertion, or laziness.^[2]

Views concerning the virtue of work to support society and further God's plan suggest that through inactivity, one invites sin. 'For Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do. Satan is the god of sin, the underworld and all things evil.' ('Against Idleness and Mischief' by Isaac Watts).

Definition[edit]

The word 'sloth' is a translation of the Latin term acedia (Middle English, acciditties) and means 'without care'. Spiritually, acedia first referred to an affliction to women, religious persons, especially monks, wherein they became indifferent to their duties and obligations to God. Mentally, acedia, has a number of distinctive components of which the most important is affectlessness, a lack of any feeling about self or other, a mind-state that gives rise to boredom, rancor, apathy, and a passive inert or sluggish mentation. Physically, acedia is fundamentally with a cessation of motion and an indifference to work; it finds expression in laziness, idleness, and indolence.^[1] Two commentators consider the most accurate translation of acedia to be 'self-pity,' for it 'conveys both the melancholy of the condition and self-centeredness upon which it is founded.'^[3]

Catholicism[edit]

In his Summa Theologica, Saint Thomas Aquinas defined sloth as 'sorrow about spiritual good' and as 'facetiousness of the mind which neglects to begin good... [it] is evil in its effect, if it so oppresses men as to draw him away entirely from good deeds.'^[4] According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, 'acedia or sloth goes so far to refuse joy from God and is repelled by goodness.'^[5]

Sloth ignores the seven gifts of grace given by the Holy Ghost (wisdom, understanding, counsel, knowledge, piety, fortitude, and fear of the Lord); such disregard slows spiritual progress towards life —- to neglect manifold duties of charity towards the neighbour, and animosity towards God.^[6]

Unlike the other capital sins,^{[citation needed]} in which the sinner commits immoral acts,^{[citation needed]} sloth is a sin of omission of desire and/or performance. It may arise from any of the other capital vices; for example, a son may omit his duty to his father through anger. While the state and habit of sloth is a mortal sin [dubious], the habit of the soul tending towards the last mortal state of sloth is not mortal in and of itself except under certain circumstances.^[6]

Orthodoxy[edit]

In the Philokalia, the word dejection is used instead of sloth, for the person who falls into dejection will lose interest in life.

Others[edit]

Sloth has also been defined as a failure to do things that one should do, though the understanding of the sin in antiquity was that this laziness or lack of work was simply a symptom of the vice of apathy or indifference, particularly an apathy or boredom with God.^{[7][better source needed]}

Emotionally and cognitively, the evil of acedia finds expression in a lack of any feeling for the world, for the people in it, or for the self. Acedia takes form as an alienation of the sentient self first from the world and then from itself. Although the most profound versions of this condition are found in a withdrawal from all forms of participation in or care for others or oneself, a lesser but more noisome element was also noted by theologians. From tristitia, asserted Gregory the Great, 'there arise malice, rancour, cowardice, [and] despair...' Geoffrey Chaucer, too, dealt with this attribute of acedia, counting the characteristics of the sin to include despair, somnolence, idleness, tardiness, negligence, indolence, and wrawnesse, the last variously translated as 'anger' or better as 'peevishness'. For Chaucer, human's sin consists of languishing and holding back, refusing to undertake works of goodness because, he/she tells him/her self, the circumstances surrounding the establishment of good are too grievous and too difficult to suffer. Acedia in Chaucer's view is thus the enemy of every source and motive for work.^[8]

Sloth not only subverts the livelihood of the body, taking no care for its day-to-day provisions but also slows down the mind, halting its attention to matters of great importance. Sloth hinders man in his righteous undertakings and becomes a path to ruin.^[8]

According to Peter Binsfeld's Binsfeld's Classification of Demons, Belphegor is the chief demon of the sin Sloth.^[9]

Clinical Psychologist Dr. William Backus has pointed out the similarities between sloth and depression. “Depression involves aversion to effort, and the moral danger of sloth lies in this characteristic. The work involved in exercising one’s will to make moral and spiritual decisions seems particularly undesirable and demanding. Thus the slothful person drifts along in habits of sin, convinced that he has no willpower and aided in this claim by those who persist in seeking only biological and environmental causes and medical remedies for sloth.”^[10]

See also[edit]

References[edit]

1. ^ ^abLyman, Stanford (1989). The Seven Deadly Sins: Society and Evil. p. 5. ISBN0-930390-81-4.
2. ^'the definition of sloth'. Dictionary.com. Retrieved 2016-05-03.
3. ^Kurtz, Ernest; Ketcham, Katherine. Experiencing Spirituality: Finding Meaning Through Storytelling. Tarcher Perigee. p. 220.
4. ^Thomas Aquinas. 'The Summa Theologica II-II.Q35.A1 (Sloth)' (1920, Second and Revised ed.). New Advent.
5. ^'Paragraph 2094'. Catechism of the Catholic Church, Second Edition. Libreria Editrice Vaticana. 2012.
6. ^ ^abManning, Henry Edward (1874). Sin and Its Consequences. London: Burns and Oates. pp. 40, 103–117.
7. ^http://www.desiringgod.org/messages/lazy-busy
8. ^ ^abLyman, Stanford (1989). The Seven Deadly Sins: Society and Evil. Rowman & Littlefield. pp. 6–7. ISBN9780930390815.
9. ^Encyclopedia of Demons and Demonology, By Rosemary Guiley, p. 28-29, Facts on File, 2009.
10. ^Backus, Dr. William (2000). What Your Counselor Never Told You. Bethany House. pp. 147–148.

Bibliography[edit]

Slotomania

• Bible, English Standard Version Revised, 1971, Biblegateway.com, http://www.biblegateway.com/
• Catholic Encyclopedia, Sloth, http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14057c.htm
• Thomas Pynchon: The Deadly Sins/Sloth; Nearer, My Couch, to Thee, New York Times, June 6, 1993

External links[edit]

Sloth Definition

Sloth Sin