Heard on radio that sloths eat more Indians in India than tigers. True or False?

Answer 1

FALSE

Sloths are South American herbivores. They move soooo slow that algae grows on them. There is no way a sloth could catch a human. The three-toed sloth can be pretty ornery when captured, but still would not eat a human. I have a feeling you misheard the radio or they were simply pulling your leg.

Answer 2

Given that sloths live in South America, I suspect that the number of Indians eaten by sloths is zero. Slots are also generally vegetarian. The number of people eaten by tigers is on the order of dozens (some claim hundreds).

(There are about 3,000 tigers in India, and sources claim that about 3% of tigers are man-eaters at some point. A tiger lives for around 15 years. That would suggest a half-dozen deaths by tiger per year, if each tiger ate only one person in his lifetime.)

So I'm going to have to go with False.

Answer 3

Could you possibly mean sloth BEARS?

The person on the radio was possibly referring to sloth bears, which do live in India and though not as large as North American bears, are dangerous.

Answer 4

Sloths are native to South America, not the Indian or Asian subcontinent, they are tree dwellers, they move far too slowly to be a danger to people even if they weren't vegetarians. Definitely false.

About sloths:

http://csam.montclair.edu/ceterms/mammals/sloths.html

Answer 5

I'd say true. There are a lot more sloths than there are tigers, and very few deaths by tiger.

My guess is there would be far more deaths by rat than by tiger. Certainly more by starvation.

Answer 6

False. In the wild, they are predominantly herbivores, while in zoos they may eat omnivore diets. Since they eat low-energy diets and prefer to stay up in the trees - it seems unimaginable that a sloth would attack a human.

Perhaps they said "sloth bear" - see this article:
http://home.comcast.net/~cefprice/slothbear/Sloth_bear_page.htm

Answer 7

last time i checked sloths were vegetarians and lived in south american rain forrests

Answer 8

False!! A Sloth lives hanging upside down in a tree. They only move about 2 miles a day they are so slow metabolically. They could catch a person to begin with and they don't eat people or attack them. Here are the Sloth, the Tiger, and the Sloth Bear. Only the last two are native to India.

Sloths are medium-sized mammals that live in South America and Central America belonging to the families Megalonychidae and Bradypodidae, part of the order Pilosa. Most scientists call these two families the Folivora suborder, while some call it Phyllophaga.
Sloths are omnivores, eating mainly vegetation. Sloths may also eat insects and small lizards and carrion.
Sloths have made extraordinary adaptations to an arboreal browsing lifestyle. Leaves, their main food source, provide very little energy or nutrition and do not digest easily: sloths have very large, specialized, slow-acting stomachs with multiple compartments in which symbiotic bacteria break down the tough leaves.
As much as two-thirds of a well-fed sloth's body-weight consists of the contents of its stomach, and the digestive process can take as long as a month or more to complete. Even so, leaves provide little energy, and sloths deal with this by a range of economy measures: they have very low metabolic rates (less than half of that expected for a creature of their size), and maintain low body temperatures when active (30 to 34 degrees Celsius or 86 to 93 degrees Fahrenheit), and still lower temperatures when resting. Sloths mainly live in Cecropia trees.

Tigers (Panthera tigris) are mammals of the Felidae family and one of four "big cats" in the Panthera genus. They are superpredators and the largest species in the world, comparable in size to the biggest fossil felids. The Royal Bengal Tiger is the most common subspecies of tiger, constituting approximately 80% of the entire tiger population, and is found in the Indian subcontinent. The tiger's beautiful blend of grace and ferocity led the legendary author and conservationist, Jim Corbett to remark, "The Tiger is a large hearted gentleman with boundless courage...".
Most tigers live in forests or grasslands, for which their camouflage is ideally suited, and where it is easy to hunt prey that are faster or more agile. Among the big cats, only the tiger and jaguar are strong swimmers; tigers are often found bathing in ponds, lakes, and rivers. Tigers hunt alone and eat primarily medium to large sized herbivores such as sambar deer, wild pigs, gaur, and water buffalo. However, they also take smaller prey on occasion. Old and injured tigers have been known to take to easier prey such as humans or domestic cattle and are then termed as man-eaters or cattle-lifters which often leads to them being captured, shot or poisoned.
Humans are the tiger's only true predator, as tigers are often poached illegally for their fur. Also, their bones and nearly all body parts are used in traditional Chinese medicine for a range of purported uses including pain killers and aphrodisiacs. Poaching for fur and destruction of habitat have greatly reduced tiger populations in the wild. A century ago, it is estimated there were over 100,000 tigers in the world; now numbers are down to below 2,500 mature breeding individuals, with no subpopulation containing more than 250 mature breeding individuals.
Tigers are the largest and heaviest cats in the world. Although different subspecies of tiger have different characteristics, in general male tigers weigh between 200 and 320 kg (440 lb and 700 lb) and females between 120 and 181 kg (265 lb and 400 lb). At an average, males are between 2.6 and 3.3 metres (8 feet 6 inches to 10 feet 8 inch) in length, and females are between 2.3 and 2.75 metres (7 ft 6 in and 9 ft) in length. Of the living subspecies, Sumatran tigers are the smallest, and Amur or Siberian Tigers are the largest.
Most tigers have orange coats, a fairer medial and ventral area and stripes that vary from brown or hay to pure black. The white tiger has far fewer apparent stripes. White tigers, however, are not a separate sub-species; they are leucistic Indian tigers. The form and density of stripes differs between subspecies, but most tigers have in excess of 100 stripes. The now-extinct Javan tiger may have had far more than this. The pattern of stripes is unique to each animal, and thus could potentially be used to identify individuals, much in the same way as fingerprints are used to identify people. This is not, however, a preferred method of identification, due to the difficulty of recording the stripe pattern of a wild tiger. It seems likely that the function of stripes is camouflage, serving to hide these animals from their prey. The stripe pattern is found on a tiger's skin and if shaved, its distinctive camouflage pattern would be preserved.
Like most cats, tigers are believed to have some degree of colour vision.

The Sloth Bear (Melursus ursinus) is a nocturnal bear with shaggy fur. It inhabits the lowland forests of India, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. There have also been some sightings in Bhutan. The Sloth Bear is the only bear species classified in genus Melursus.
Its body is covered in long fur which can range from auburn to black, and has a whitish snout and black nose. The snout is long, with bare lips and lacking in upper incisors. These are adaptations for its insect-based diet. The front feet are turned inwards and have non-retractable, curved ivory claws that are adapted for digging. It has a distinctive "V" shaped white mark on the chest. The males are larger than the females; males can reach a height of 6 feet (1.8 m) and a weight of 300 pounds (140 kg).
The Sloth Bear does not move as slowly as a sloth, and can easily out run a human. One theory has it that early explorers saw these bears lying upside down in trees and gave them their common name for the similarity to the way a sloth hangs in trees. Another claims that the Sloth Bear gets its name because its normal walk is more of a meandering shuffle. Its pugmarks are also very similar to a human footprint.
It primarily eats ants and termites. If needed, it will also eat honey, eggs, birds, flowers, tubers, fruits, grains and meat.
Baloo, from The Jungle Book, is a Sloth Bear.

Answer 9

true