A family and other passersby stopped during their travels to help a sloth in the middle of the road.
While they all had a sense of urgency about the situation, the sloth didn’t seem to feel the need to hasten his pace.
Some human men decided he needed a little help along the way. So, one of the men grabbed a large tree branch for the sloth to latch on to.
Another man had a different idea and was about to grab the sloth around the middle and pick him up and walk him over to the side of the road.
But the others around him warned him against it.
“Don’t touch it!” they told him.
Touching sloths, especially those that are in the wild, can be damaging to the sloth’s health.
“While we care deeply about animal welfare and all of this is very unpleasant for the individual sloth (with scientific evidence proving that all sloths experience abnormal blood pressure reactions in response to human contact due to internalized stress) there is an even bigger concern. There are dangerous knock-on consequences for sloths in the wild,” the Sloth Conservation Foundation finds.
Wild sloths can become disoriented, sick, and lost if humans touch them.
Thankfully, the little sloth grabbed onto the branch, which two men carried over onto the side of the road.
The sloth looked pretty confused with all the people starring around him filming him with their cell phones.
The sloth was laid in the grass and eventually crawled away back into the forest, but not before giving what appeared to be a little wave.
“He said, ‘Thank you,'” a man says in the background.
But that likely wasn’t the case, according to The Sloth Conservation Foundation. It was probably the opposite, and the sloth may have been scared of all the people around him.
Sloths will raise their arms to look bigger when they feel threatened.
“This is often observed when for example a sloth crossing the road meets a human. People that see sloths in the wild, often blindly mistake this reaction to the sloth waving or asking for a hug,” the website Brainy Backpackers writes.
“Now, that sounds weird when you read it out loud! Why would a wild animal ask another creature 10 times bigger than themselves for a hug? Wouldn’t it be more natural that they try to protect themselves?”
Either way, that sloth was lucky those people were there to help him along without having to pick him up.
A fast-moving car could have come along and hit that sloth, but that thankfully didn’t happen.
“The sloth was probably surprised at the speed of the encounter. Fastest he’s moved in his entire existence,” one YouTuber commented.
Many on YouTube commentated that the sloth should have been placed in a tree instead of on the ground, but apparently, these saviors weren’t aware of that or maybe they did after the cameras stopped rolling.
Check out the video below to see the men attempting to save the sloth.
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