No Sloth Selfies - The Rush to Protect Latin America's Slowest Mammal [View all]

While Latin America is home to the trafficking of all manner of species, several foundations are working to save arguably its slowest-moving victims: the sloths.

The trafficking of these placid creatures has often gone underreported aside from a few important legal cases. In Colombia, the most recent example came last April when a man was arrested in the southwestern department of Nariño for attempting to sell a sloth for 3 million pesos ($810).

And the country’s most well-known case came in 2015 when Isaac Miguel Bedoya Guevara, a wildlife trafficker from the northern department of Córdoba, was sentenced to over five years in prison for trafficking more than 3,000 sloths. Over the course of 30 years, Bedoya is suspected of having captured over 10,000.

Bedoya and his partners were systematic in their operations. He regularly updated maps of sloth nests, making them easier to find. He then systematically removed babies from their mothers before cutting their nails and selling them to international buyers, including the United States and Italy.


https://insightcrime.org/news/no-sloth-selfies-rush-protect-latin-america-slowest-mammal/