Jagaur Rescue & The Sloth Sanctaury in Costa Rica

Jaguar rescue

  I found the tour to be both interesting & informative.  It's wonderful what they are doing both helping the animals and educating those who come to visit. A wonderful surprise to me was getting to go in the baby howler enclosure where you actually play with them. Each afternoon when there are no tours they take the howlers on what they called, a monkey picnic, where the monkeys are free to climb trees in hopes a troop of howlers will come by and take one or two. It's a good way to release them into the wild & has been very successful. 

  The goal here is to rehabilitate and releases as many as they can.  There are several baby sloths here and they are very cute. It was a wonderful experience to watch a baby practice climbing trees. There are no adult sloths here, which means to me their program works well. 

The volunteers are very helpful and you can tell they care about what they are doing here. 

This is a place you don't want to miss. Well worth giving the $15.00 admission fee to help fund the rescue. 

The Sloth Sanctuary

    A month or so before my trip I saw too cute baby sloths on animal planet. It was filmed at the Sloth Sanctuary.  This had me very excited as I would be able to visit it while staying in Puerto Viejo. I even was thinking about volunteering here one day along with my Mom. We decided I would go check it out which I did and found it to be very disappointing. 

Buttercup

First we entered into a large gift shop where we paid $25.00 for a 2 hour tour. We got to see Buttercup who was the first sloth that was bought here years ago & now sits in her queen’s chair. 

Next we meet the baby sloths & were told how they all got here. They are really cute. But there was not much talk about how they would be released back to the wild more talk about how they could never survive if released.

 Next we watched a 15 - 20 minute movie about how the owners got started & the 2 success stories of the sloths they did release. 

From here we meet 5 of the adult sloths all living in zoo like enclosures who are here due to an injury & will remain here for life. One cage had 2 sloths together, good buddies we were told. However they are male & female. She told us they have had births here, a surprising fact. 

 I asked how many adult sloths they had & there are 138 living there.  We did not get to see any of them. You could see the area where they are living and it’s some form of enclosure of cages.

 Now I am not by any means authority on sloths or sloth rehabilitation but it looks to me if a sloths gets here it doesn't leave. Maybe this is okay as sanctuary does mean, a safe place.

  I think the people do believe in what they are doing but it's more like a sloth zoo. 

The last hour of the tour they take you on a very slow canoe ride through the steam outback. This should be optionally. Of course it makes the tour longer & can charge more. I imagine the sloth sanctuary is a popular tour for the cruise ships coming to port in Limon.