Slow Loris
The only venomous primate: it mixes a secretion from a gland on its arm with saliva. It moves slowly and deliberately, and it is awake at night.
Overview
The slow loris is the only venomous primate. It produces an oil in brachial glands at its elbows, mixes it with saliva by grooming, and the result is potent enough to kill an adult human if a bite is not treated properly. That is the fact everything else about this animal sits behind.
It is a small nocturnal tree dweller, 27 to 38 centimetres and around 600 to 685 grams, that moves slowly and deliberately with three limbs on the branch at any time. The diet is roughly a third gums, a third nectar and a quarter fruit, with insects, snails and eggs making up the rest. In good captive conditions they average about 24 years, and under stressed or aggressive conditions that drops to 12 to 14.
Temperament
Nocturnal, solitary in habit, and profoundly stressed by handling. Slow lorises are quiet, slow moving animals whose defence is to stay still and to bite when that fails, and daytime activity in a household is the opposite of everything they are built for.
They are also loud in the frequencies people cannot hear and silent in the ones people can, which is part of why distress in a loris goes unnoticed for a long time. An animal that appears calm is very often an animal that has stopped moving.
Care and grooming
Gum and nectar, not fruit salad. This is a specialised exudate feeder, and the captive diets that go wrong go wrong by being sweet and simple, which produces dental disease, diabetes and obesity.
The venom shapes the veterinary picture too. Handling requires people who know the species, a bite is a medical event rather than a scratch, and there are very few clinicians anywhere with real slow loris experience.
Living and exercise
Tall, warm, humid and dark during the day, with a reversed light cycle so the animal is awake when nobody is disturbing it. Continuous horizontal branches matter more than open space, because a loris moves by bridging from one support to the next and will not cross a gap.
The legal position is not ambiguous. Every slow loris is listed on CITES Appendix I, which prohibits international commercial trade, and the Sunda slow loris is Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List. Roughly 90 percent of animals taken for the pet trade have had their teeth cut out first, which is how a venomous animal is made handleable and which frequently kills them.
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