Slothville

My name is Lucy Cooke and I’m a zoologist, filmmaker and writer with a passion for odd animals. In 2010 I traveled 5000 miles to a sleepy corner of Costa Rica to meet a particularly strange creature that I first saw on Youtube. Taz, a miniature hairy Yoda with Jedi strength comic powers and a persistently itchy bum, was one of two hundred residents at the Aviarios del Caribe sloth sanctuary. 

I fell in love with the sloths and their sleepy ways and made my own little video, “Meet the Sloths”, which went viral within days. It was picked up by newspapers across the world from the Huffington Post to the Guardian. The video has now been watched by over 6 million people and gathered famous fans like Ashton Kutcher, Ricky Gervaise, Stephen Fry, Jonathan Ross and most recently Kristen Bell. According to the Washington Post sloths are now ‘the new kittens’.

I’ve now made a full length documentary about the sanctuary for Animal Planet. In the US it is called ‘Too Cute! Baby Sloths’ and in the UK it is called ‘Meet the Sloths’. The documentary premiered in 2012 and was such a massive success that the Aviarios sanctuary is now swamped with volunteer applications and a series is in development.

If you like this blog, a book of my funny sloth photos and stories, ‘The Little Book of Sloth’ will be published by Simon and Schuster in March 2013.

The Aviarios sloth sanctuary in Costa Rica relies on donations to continue rescuing and rehabilitating injured and orphaned sloths. If you like the work I do and love the sloths then please click here to make a donation. And please remember that as cute as they are, sloths belong in the wild and should never be kept as pets.