You Can Now Visit This Home For Retired Sloths In Wales

Move as fast as you can, because a retirement home for sloths has just opened in a zoo in Wales and it’s open to visitors.

It’s official, Folly Farm in Pembrokeshire, Wales has opened one of the cutest retirement villages in the world. The residents are Tuppee and Lightcap, two senior sloths who are living it up in their golden years.

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Tuppee is a 24-year-old male sloth, and Lightcap is a 34-year-old female and the fifth-oldest sloth in any European zoo. We’d say they’ve both earned a few comfy twilight years.

Sloths can live for around 20 years in the wild but have been known to reach the ripe old age of 50 in captivity. Like many mammals, they find it difficult to breed when they hit old age. Folly Farm opened the retirement home as a conservation effort to look after these sloths who can’t contribute to a zoo’s breeding program but who still have lots of life left in them.

 

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Many animals experience old age similarly to humans. Ageing animals tend to suffer aching muscles and creaking joints and sloths, the notoriously slow-moving creatures, begin to slow down even more. So that’s something for us and the sloth teens to look forward to.

 

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The zoo does a number of very cute things to help their ageing residents. They boil root vegetables to make them easier to eat and add supplements like cod liver oil. They’re also keeping an eye on Tuppee and Lightcap’s agility and may lower the height of the branches in the enclosure to make them easier to climb.

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The enclosure itself is a large heated room with branches and ropes for climbing and a few nest boxes for the sloths to relax in. Double glazed windows mean that loud visitors won’t disturb the residents. Hello, yes, where can I sign up for this?

You can visit Tuppee and Lightcap during Folly Farm’s opening hours. While you’re making plans to visit the retirement home, we should probably remind you to call your grandma.

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(Lead image: Folly Farm)