I live in the Americas, in Central and the South
I am a happy mammal, with a constant smile upon my mouth.
There are two families of my species, named after our feet
And also we are different, in what we hunt and eat.
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Eleven thousand years ago, a few of us were living on the ground
The size of elephants we were weighed in tons, and not with pound…
But the arrival of humans made us easy targets, eaten and extinct
What stayed was our mini-version, the one that smiled and blinked.
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Also, we are easy target, that means we moved us to the trees
Where we do all, eat and sleep, and slowly move, breed and pair and sneeze.
We don’t have much energy, we don’t do well with others too
Normally, we all are loners, unless we are playing peek-a-boo.
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We haven’t much developed lately, we stay frozen in our form
We smile, we eat, and we move slowly, to us that is the given norm.
Once a week we might come down from our favorite living tree
Fertilize the soil below it, before climbing up again to be.
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Our fur is brown, sometimes beige, always straight, and never curled.
We are breeding a very special, unique moth within the insect world.
Our name comes from our movement, sluggish, lazy, very slow.
The name is program, you might guess, we are a ‘sloth’, that is to know.
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(Copyright, Aurora Jean Alexander, April 2022)
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