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Anonymous
"There are two-toed and three-toed sloths, wich is determined by the front feet since all sloths have three toes on their back feet. One summer I hade the great fortune to get to study the three-toed sloth "in situ" in the jungles of Brazil. It is a most fascinating creature. It's only real characteristic is lazyness. The sloth sleeps or rests 20 hours per day. Our team of scientists tested five wild three-toed sloths sleeping habits by putting a red bowl filled with water on their heads in the early evening. Later the following morning the buckets were still there and were florishing with insects. The sloth is mostly active by the sunset, and by active I mean it in its most relaxed meaning. It moves along a tree branch in its characteristic up-side-down manner at a speed of 400 metres per hour. Down on the ground it moves to the next tree at a speed of 250 metres per second if it's motivated, wich is 440 times slower then a motivated cheetah. Unmotivated the sloth covers about four or five metres per hour. The three toed sloth is not very well informed about the world around it. On a scale from 2 to 10 where 2 is "extraordinary slow minded" and ten is "Extremely sharp" the three toed sloth was given a 2 in it's taste-, feeling and hearingsenses and a 3 in it's smelling sense by Beebe (1926). If you were to run into a sloth in the wild it should requiere you to gently poke it two or three times for it to wake up and look around in every direction except yours. Why it looks around is uncertain since the sloth sees as bad as Mr. Magoo. Concerning hearing it is not especially deaf, just uninterested óf sound."
A bit from the book "The tale about Pi" (?) by Yann Martel translated by me.
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