Sloths are increasingly exploited in wildlife tourism — held for photographs or kept as pets. This causes severe welfare harm to animals with specialised physiological and behavioural needs.
Sloth tourism welfare is a clear and serious problem masked by the animals' apparently placid appearance. Sloths have evolved extreme physiological conservatism — their slow movement, low body temperature, and minimal metabolic rate are adaptations to a low-energy leaf diet. Handling violates this system profoundly: the stress response requires energy expenditure that sloths are physiologically ill-equipped to sustain, causing immune suppression and organ stress. The sloth's apparent calmness when handled is not contentment but physiological shutdown — a stress response, not a sign of comfort. Wildlife selfie tourism with sloths drives demand for wild-caught animals (often orphaned when mothers are killed), creates unsustainable captivity conditions, and causes deaths that are invisible to the tourists who believe they are having a harmless experience.