Overview
A wonderfully entertaining celebration of that most unique of creatures: the sloth.
In public estimation, sloths have undergone an astonishing transformation in the course of the past few years. Thanks largely to YouTube clips posted by the sloth orphanage in Costa Rica, sloths have attracted a vast audience of admirers. Instead of seeing them as ridiculous anachronisms of which we know little, they have turned into creatures considered by many to be the most endearing on earth.
Over much the same period, scientific investigations have also changed our view of sloths. No longer are they seen as total misfits in the modern world but, in the words of one specialist sloth investigator, they are 'masters of an alternative lifestyle'.
In this wonderfully entertaining celebration of this most unique of creatures, William Hartston reveals the fascinating history of the sloth, from the prehistoric ground sloth to modern pygmy sloths in Panama, explores the current state of the science of sloths and reveals the truth behind sloth behaviour.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781786494245 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Atlantic Books |
| Publication date: | 10/18/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 208 |
| Sales rank: | 590,015 |
| File size: | 18 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
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CHAPTER 1
A SLOTH BY ANY OTHER NAME
'Nothing irritates me more than chronic laziness in others. Mind you, it's only mental sloth I object to. Physical sloth can be heavenly.'
Elizabeth Hurley
I blame the Portuguese.
The word 'sloth' has been in the English language meaning 'slowness' since the twelfth century at least. Formed in much the same way as 'width', meaning 'wideness', and often spelt 'slowth' or 'sloath', it was not used to refer to a particular animal until the mid-fifteenth century when, for reasons that are very unclear, it became used as a collective noun for bears. 'Sleuth' was also used by some writers for a company of bears, but as there is no explanation for either a sleuth or sloth of bears, it is unclear which came first or whether one was an error for the other.
The first reference in English to the animal we now know as sloth by that name was, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, in 1613 in a work by the Anglican clergyman Samuel Purchas entitled Purchas His Pilgrimage: or Relations of the World and the Religions observed in all Ages and Places discovered, from the Creation unto this Present. The book was intended to celebrate the diversity of God's creation and consisted of a collection of travellers' tales told to him by sailors. Since Purchas had, by his own proud admission, never travelled as much as 200 miles from Thaxted in Essex, where he was born, the tales were thus necessarily second-hand, but they referred to 'A Treatise of Brazil, written by a Portugall which had long lived there'. His description of the animals of Brazil included a thoroughly derogatory reference to something the Portuguese called priguiça, which Purchas translates as 'laziness':
The Priguiça (which they call) of Brasill, is worth the seeing; it is like a shag-haire Dog, or a Landspaniell, they are very ougly, and the face is like a woman's evill drest, his fore and hinder feet are long, hee hath great clawes and cruell, they goe with the breast on the earth, and their young fast to their bellie. Though ye strike it never so fast, it goeth so leasurely, that it hath need of a long time to get up into a tree, and so they are easily taken; their food is certaine Fig-tree leaves, and therefore they cannot bee brought to Portugall, for as soone as they want them they die presently.
Actually it is rather doubtful that Purchas was suggesting 'sloth' as the English name for the animal. The above quotation comes from the fourth (1625), hugely expanded edition of his work, which does not refer to the animal as a 'sloth' at all. That word appears, as the OED says, in the first (1613) edition, in which he refers to 'a deformed beast of such slow pace, that in fifteene dayes it will scarse goe a stones cast. It liueth on the leaues of trees, on which it is two dayes in climing, and as many in descending, neither shouts nor blowes forcing her to amend her pace.' Next to this, in a sidenote, he says: 'The Spaniards call it (of the contrary) the light dog. The Portugals Sloth. The Indians, Hay.'
Other later writers also give the native American words for the animal as 'aie' or 'aï', which is supposedly indicative of the cry of a sloth in distress (or female sloth's mating call – we shall discuss the sounds made by a sloth later). Why Purchas changed his translation of the Portuguese word for the animal from 'sloth' to 'laziness' is a mystery, but over the course of the seventeenth century, practically every European language had adopted a similar word for the animal. Purchas's book was a great influence at the time; indeed, his Pilgrimage was the very book that Samuel Taylor Coleridge fell asleep reading before he woke up and wrote his classic poem 'Kubla Khan'. 'In Xamdu did Cublai Can build a stately palace,' as Purchas put it, which Coleridge turned, almost 200 years later, into: 'In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree.' Of all the 4,000 pages of Purchas's great work, this influence on Coleridge must be what he is most remembered for, but his rudeness about sloths was also mimicked by others.
The first to slag off sloths in English was London clergyman Edward Topsell, who called the sloth a bear-ape or Arctopithecus in his History of Four-Footed Beasts (1607): There is in America a very deformed beast which the inhabitants call Haut or Hauti, & the Frenchmen Guenon, as big as a great Affrican Monkey. His belly hangeth very low, his head and face like unto a childes, as may be seen by this lively picture, and being taken it wil sigh like a young childe. His skin is of an ash-colour, and hairie like a Beare: he hath but three clawes on a foot, as longe as foure fingers, and like the thornes of Privet, whereby he climbeth up into the highest trees, and for the most part liveth of the leaves of a certain tree being of an exceeding height, which the Americans call Amahut, and thereof this beast is called Haut. Their tayle is about three fingers long, having very little haire thereon, it hath beene often tried, that though it suffer any famine, it will not eate the fleshe of a living man, and one of them was given me by a French-man, which I kept alive sixe and twenty daies, and at the last it was killed by Dogges, and in that time when I had set it abroad in the open ayre, I observed, that although it often rained, yet was that beast never wet. When it is tame it is very loving to a man, and desirous to climbe uppe to his shoulders, which those naked Amerycans cannot endure, by reason of the sharpenesse of his clawes.
Actually, Topsell got most of that information from a book called Icones Animalium (1552) by the Swiss naturalist Conrad Gesner, including the part about a sloth given by a Frenchman and kept alive for twenty-six days. In view of this, it seems unlikely that Topsell ever saw a sloth himself. Gesner also acknowledged that his information did not come first-hand, but he did mention, which Topsell chose to ignore, that the claws of a sloth are 'longer than those of a lion or any of the wild beasts known to us'. Both Gesner and Topsell wrote their books before Purchas, so the latter could be said to have been continuing an already established, let's-be-rude-to-sloths tradition, which exerted a strong influence throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The real problem, however, began with Pliny the Elder in the first century AD.
Pliny's Naturalis Historia was perhaps the first encyclopedia of the natural world. Its thirty-seven books, divided into ten volumes, covered everything from agriculture to zoology, from painting and sculpture to mathematics and bee-keeping, setting a pattern for all other encyclopedists to follow for at least a millennium and a half. Indeed, it was one of the first ancient texts to be published in Europe, appearing in Venice in 1469, which was not long after the invention of the printing press around 1440.
Pliny, however, was not one to be inhibited by a lack of knowledge, and when he was writing of things outside his personal experience, he was liable to conflate truth with myth and observation with hearsay, which is precisely what the early writers on sloths had no compunctions about doing.
The real trouble with sloths was that they were American, while the writing of natural history had been dominated by Europeans from before Pliny to long after Columbus. As we have seen, and shall soon have confirmed by further examples, the leading European naturalists wrote a lot of rubbish about sloths, but science itself was still in its early days. Despite Pliny's Naturalis Historia, the term 'natural history' was not seen in the English language until 1534 (though it had been preceded by 'natural science', which included physics and chemistry, since 1425). The word 'zoology' did not arrive in the language until Robert Boyle used it in 1663, and 'scientific method' was first referred to in 1672. So perhaps we should not be too harsh on these gentlemen for being unscientific, when they did not really even have anything going by the name of 'science' to be unscientific about.
Among the earliest writers on New World animals in general and sloths in particular were Gesner (1516–65), whom we have already mentioned, and the Dutchman Carolus Clusius (1526–1609), who was also known as Charles de l'Écluse. They both drew very fanciful pictures of sloths, which confirm that they almost certainly never saw one but were relying on the descriptions of others.
Among those descriptions may well have been the writings of the Spanish historian Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés (1478–1557), who spent many years in Central America, and several Portuguese missionaries and businessmen who wrote of their strange encounters in Brazil. Their various descriptions of sloths read like a game of Chinese whispers with the truth distorted in various different ways. Some seem to have concocted their stories in large part from the writings of others; some seem to have caught some fleeting glimpse of sloths themselves, but to have filled in the details with tales they have been told; while others are so vague or incorrect, it suggests their sloth experience is very limited. The French writers André Thevet (1516?–92) and Jean de Léry (1534–1613), for example, both wrote that sloths have human faces, with Thevet more precisely suggesting that it was the face of a child. Léry pointed out that sloths had never been seen eating, so he concluded that they live on air.
In 1560, the Spanish Jesuit José de Anchieta correctly pointed out that they fed on leaves. He also said they were slower than snails and had a woman's face. This last point was expanded by Fernão Cardim (1549–1625), who said it was a very ugly face 'like a badly touched woman'. Unlike the others, who all depicted sloths as walking upright on all fours like other quadrupeds, Cardim said that they walked with their belly on the ground, very slowly. Most confusingly of all, perhaps, the German explorer George Marcgrave (1610–44) gave by far the most detailed and accurate description, complete with measurements, but he reproduced one of Clusius's drawings of the animal which made it look like a sheep with a human face.
The above descriptions can be found in a 2016 paper entitled 'Sloths of the Atlantic Forest in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries' by Danielle Moreira and Sérgio L. Mendes in the Annals of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences. They end the paper with a well thought-out explanation of the reasons behind their findings:
This era of pre-Linnaean zoology was not fundamentally interested in the accurate investigation of nature itself. Instead, it followed the traditions of Renaissance classicism, which emphasizes the author's stories and knowledge. At that time, faunal records tended to focus on the symbolic meaning of the animals represented, rather than attempting to reflect precisely their zoological reality.
In the eighteenth century, when this era of symbolic nonsense-peddling should have been coming to an end, it was the French who continued the process of delivering incorrect views of sloths, but more authoritatively than ever. In 1749, the French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, wrote this character assassination:
The sloth, which is called ai, or hai, by the natives of Brasil, on account of the plaintive cry of ai, which it continually sends forth, seems likewise to be confined to the new continent. It is ... scarcely so quick in his motion as the turtle; it has but three claws on each foot, its fore legs are longer than its hind ones, it has a very short tail, and no ears.
The animals of South America, which alone properly belong to this new continent, are almost all without tusks, horns, and tails; their figure is grotesque, their bodies and limbs ill proportioned, and some, as the ant-eaters, sloth, &c. are so miserably formed, that they scarcely have the faculties of moving or of eating; with pain they drag on a languishing life in the solitude of a desart, and cannot subsist in the inhabited regions, where man and powerful animals would have soon destroyed them.
In proportion as Nature is lively, active, and exalted in the ape species, she is slow, constrained, and cramped in the sloths. These animals have neither incisive nor canine teeth; their eyes are dull, and almost concealed with hair; their mouths are wide, and their lips thick and heavy; their fur is coarse, and looks like dried grass; their thighs seem almost disjointed from the haunches; their legs very short and badly shaped; they have no soles to their feet, nor toes separately moveable, but only two or three claws excessively long and crooked downwards, which move together, and are only useful to the animal in climbing. Slowness, stupidity, and even habitual pain, result from its uncouth conformation. They have no arms either to attack or defend themselves; nor are they furnished with any means of security, as they can neither scratch up the earth nor seek for safety by flight, but confined to a small spot of ground, or to the tree under which they are brought forth, they remain prisoners in the midst of an extended space, unable to move more than three feet in an hour; they climb with difficulty and pain; and their plaintive and interrupted cry they dare only utter by night. All these circumstances announce their wretchedness, and call to our mind those imperfect sketches of Nature, which, having scarcely the power to exist, only remained a short time in the world, and then were effaced from the list of beings. In fact, if it were not a desart country where the sloths exist, but had been long inhabited by man and powerful animals, they would not have descended to our time; the whole species would have been destroyed, as at some future period will certainly be the case. We have already observed, that it seems as if all that could be, does exist; and of this the sloths appear to be a striking proof. They constitute the last term of existence in the order of animals endowed with flesh and blood. One more defect and they could not have existed. To look on these unfinished creatures as equally perfect beings with others; to admit final causes for such disparities, and from thence to determine Nature to be as brilliant in these as in her most beautiful animals, is only looking at her through a straight tube, and making its confines the final limit of our judgment ... the degraded species of the sloths are, perhaps, the only creatures to whom Nature has been unkind, and the only ones which present us the image of innate misery and wretchedness.
The French naturalist Georges Cuvier, who was the man responsible for the discovery that the extinct megatherium was a type of sloth, described the Bradypus in his 1817 book The Animal Kingdom as 'a species in which sluggishness, and all the details of the organization which produce it, are carried to the highest degree ... The arms are double the length of the legs, the hair on the head, back and limbs is long, coarse and non-elastic, something like dried hay, which gives it a most hideous aspect.'
Even Samuel Johnson fell into the same pattern in his Dictionary of the English Language (1755), defining sloth as 'An animal of so slow a motion, that he will be three or four days at least in climbing up and coming down a tree'.
Is it possible that all these derogatory writings about the poor sloth were in some way influenced by its being named after one of the Seven Deadly Sins, or is that just a piece of English language rudeness? The evidence suggests otherwise as the following sad table of the words for sloths attests:
[TABLE OMITTED]
With the exception of Italian and Greek, which have adopted versions of the scientific 'Bradypus' (meaning 'slow-foot') and the Swedish 'slow-pace', every one of those words for 'sloths' has connotations of laziness, idleness or the Deadly Sin of Sloth. Even the exotic-sounding Turkish just means 'lazy animal'.
There can hardly be an animal on earth with such an unfortunate, derogatory name. From aardvark to zebra, from baboon to yak, the vast majority of creatures have been given English names that are exclusive to them. The name of an aardvark may come from the South African Dutch for 'earth pig', 'orang-utan' may be the Malay for 'person of the forest', 'rhinoceros' may derive from the Ancient Greek for 'nose-horn', an axolotl may take its name from the Aztec for 'water' and 'dog', yet in all such cases the animal's name has been assimilated into English (and any other languages) to refer to itself alone.
(Continues…)
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Copyright © 2018 William Hartston.
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Table of Contents
Illustration Credits,
Note,
Foreword by Lucy Cooke,
Introduction,
1. A Sloth by Any Other Name,
2. Two Toes or Three?,
3. The Sloth that Saved Dublin,
4. New Sloths for Old,
5. Are Sloths Slothful?,
6. Anatomy,
7. Sex and the Solitary Sloth,
8. The Deadly Sin,
9. Pooping,
10. The Abominable Slothman, and Other Myths,
11. Sloths Eating, and Eating Sloths,
12. Sloth Conservation,
13. Sloths in Culture,
14. Oddments,
15. Costa Rica,
Further Reading,
Appendix: Sloth biscuits,
Acknowledgements,
Index,