Sloth Rescue 911

sloth rescue

Sloth Rescue 911

As I was finishing my dinner at a cozy little open air establishment on the Plaza de Armas here in Puerto Maldonado, I noticed a commotion growing out in the street. Passersby were gathering, while several police officers slowly closed in on a point on the grassy median. My natural assumption upon seeing police called into a central plaza like this one, was that we had on our hands either (1) a fight, (2) a thief, (3) a drunk, or (4) some combination of the above.

In the Peruvian Amazon, problems take a different shape.

Everyone was looking towards the ground, into the little gulley in the median. I thought then perhaps someone had tripped and fallen in. The police approached with a stretcher to help that someone – or as it turned out, something.

Caught down in the gulley, somewhat inexplicably, was a sloth. Exactly where this cute little bristle-haired, three-toed creature came from, your guess is as good as mine. But there it was, in the middle of town, as lost as a gringo in the jungle.

The police gathered him/her onto the stretcher, and carried him/her over to their waiting pickup truck. Must have felt like a celebrity, with all the paparazzi snapping away with their mobile phones, and was certainly a bit shaken up by the whole affair. And off they went, presumably to drop him/her off in the jungle. Another case closed for Sloth Rescue 911.

(The shoddy photos attached below were the best I was able to capture in those uber-fast moments.)

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