Of Sloths And Women | Monique Pool | TEDx Talk

Monique Pool teaches us about the unique way sloths live, learn and care. As a volunteer she works many hours to help, understand and nurse these animals that are brought to her injured on the street or elsewhere.

Video Transcript

Of sloths and women. It’s not because I am just correcting a little bit, of sloths and women. It’s quite a different story than of mice and men. If only because not many people can picture a sloth. A sloth is an animal that lives in South America and Central America. And it has nice furry, it’s a nice furry animal, it has a very thick belly, and very long forearms. And a very, very sweet face.

My story starts with Lucia. This baby sloth as you can see is gripping this twig very strongly, and so I want to set the record straight because there’s an urban myth going around that sloths grab on to their own arms, especially baby sloths, because they think it’s a branch, so please don’t believe it because it’s not true. As you can see the baby sloth really holds on to the twig because it’s very, very scared to fall.

Why are people so interested in sloths, because they have very special qualities, characteristics. One of them is that they have an amazing capacity to adapt. Adapt to very stressful situations. And I know that there are some women thinking “oh I know about that”, ah, so and indeed, you see a very big sloth here and her name was Smokey, she came in during the rescue in 2012. And she was the only sloth that got wounded and so we bought her inside so that we could clean the wound everyday and inside were also all the orphan babies. And as sloths are, they’re actually solitary animals, and they normally only have one baby, and we do know that sometimes accept babies from other mothers, like orphans. But Smokey completely adapted to this very stressful situation where her house was being torn down and took care of seventeen babies.

Then they have an amazing capacity for suffering. As you can see this sloth fell out of a tree, as we were told. Her name is Panama. Which is really strange because they told that she fell on her nose. If you know anything about sloth anatomy then you now that it’s really weird that if you have such a fat belly that you would fall on your nose when you fall out of a tree. So we were thinking that the only way she could have fallen out of a tree on her nose is if you pushed a tree down actually. So, she received surgery, here she is on the table, in the surgery. After a month she healed completely and we were able to release her and she was very happy, I can tell you, and she went back to a forest of which we were certain that there was not going to be deforestation. So they have this immense capacity for suffering but also to endure and to continue on their path.

They’re very smart. Also very smart animals. These sloths, how can they be smart? People always say, oh she’s beautiful so she cannot be smart. These are misconceptions we have about slowness and beauty. And I can tell you this animal Daneecha is her name, very intelligent. She was so intelligent that she came to us and we could clearly see that she had been with people, and why did we know this because her nails were filed very nicely. They didn’t put any lacquer on it but we could clearly see that she hadn’t done that herself. And as you can see she is in the toilet here. And we thought the first time we saw her in the toilet that hmmm maybe she wanted to drink, then the second time we saw her in the toilet, we were like, it’s not normal for sloths to drink so what is she doing. Then we realised that after the fourth time, that actually she knew how to use a human toilet, and she was actually using the toilet like we did. So, the only thing she didn’t manage was to flush it yet, so we had to do that for her. But we taught her then how to go to the toilet likes sloths do, and sloths go out in the garden, they do this once a week, and so she managed, she learned that very quickly, because as I said, she was a very intelligent sloth, then she actually went outside on her own, would go to the toilet and come back in. So she was definitely an animal that knew how to live with humans.

Sloths also have an enormous capacity for persistence. If they know something that they want, they will go for it. And this is Lucas, and Lucas was a baby sloth that came in when we were doing this rescue, and he’s a male sloth, and actually the only other male sloth that he allows near him is the one that is sitting with there, because a male sloth does not want another male sloth near his leaves. Recently we had another male sloth that was bought in, and Lucas decided that he was too close to his leaves, and so he wanted to fight with him. So he went up to the other sloth and started fighting with him. When sloths fight, they actually don’t really touch each other, as you can see. But the other sloth was like screaming as if he was being killed.

So what we did we took Lucas, bought him somewhere far away and thought you know that then everyone would cool down. But no, within a minute, he was back. You won’t believe it. We didn’t put him next to him, but he was faraway. But they are fast, faster then you think. Then, we again removed him and put him further away. This time, within two minutes, he was back, he knew exactly where the other sloth was and started attacking the intruder again. So then we have to, as you can see, they are quite fierce when they know what to do. We then went to put him in another room and closed the door because we decided that it was the only way to get him out. Why didn’t Lucas open the door? Well, not because he couldn’t do it, but he hadn’t learnt how to do it.

Because sloths also have an enormous capacity to teach each other things and again this shows how intelligent they are. This sloth that you see here, Bo, she use to live in my office and as you can see she was checking if I was working hard enough, hanging under my desk. And when she became older she started roaming the house and one fine day she found that in this bathroom was another sloth sitting, Winty was his name, and his fingers had been cut very brutally by somebody, and he had to stay with us for two years, because that’s how long it took for him to grow back his fingers. And she really liked Winty, so she went back, she wanted to sit with him, but we thought no we don’t want them to mate so we moved them, and then she started sitting next to the door so every time we opened the door she wanted to go inside. But we didn’t want them together. Then, what she finally did, she started opening the door herself. What was really amazing though was that at a certain moment, other sloths came in because we decided we would allow them to sit together, but new sloths would come in and they somehow without having contact with her knew how to open the door. So how do you explain that? They somehow had a way of communicating with each other, so they are very smart.

Then they have an enormous capacity for nurturing, and we have three documented cases of sloths that, actually male sloths, that nurture. Well what happened, this is a two toed baby sloth who actually was very needy. And we got him another sloth, a male sloth, and you can see them here together, but it is a three fingered sloth, so it’s like, a cat and a dog, you know living together. So the three fingered sloth, Winty too, he adopted this little one and he’s been teaching him all kind of things and in the morning you can see them together like this and the little one is now still a baby but he will grow to be twice as big as the three toed sloth and that means probably that we will see him growing with the small one who is called Berga.

Then they have an enormous capacity, actually their slowness really shows not slowness, they are deliberate, they know exactly what to do. So this sloth Harvey, he was trying to climb and he’s holding onto a very small twig, and he is really trying to get a good hanging, we would say for humans to get a good footing, before climbing up. And he indeed managed to do that without a problem, he didn’t come crashing down, because he was slow. And friend of mine recently said, whatever you do slowly, and with effort, is sustainable. And this was something her father had told her often.

So what is the connection between sloths and women. There’s a number of women I think who share these qualities and I would like to recognise them because in the past years they have helped me enormously. These women are persistent, they are smart, they are intelligent, they have the capacity for nurturing, so I recognise their work. Then there is something else. Sloths and women share, and here we see that they are releasing the nature with her baby, because women and sloths both need freedom and we need space, a clean healthy environment, that is abundant, so that we can fulfil all our dreams and achieve our potential. And that is I think a universality, a universal strength, that sloths and women share. I thank you for your attention.