Stay-at-home mum Jenni, 40 has transformed her daughter’s old bedroom into a rainforest using heaters and humidifiers.
To outsiders, this mum-of-three and her teacher husband look like any other respectable couple, leading an ordinary suburban life.
But guests hoping to stay in the spare bedroom of Jenni and Terry Koenig’s four-bedroom house an hour’s drive from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA, will first have to find a clearing in the tropical rainforest they have built inside it, as the perfect home-from-home for Enzo, their pet sloth.
For stay-at-home mum Jenni, 40, who has three children with Terry, 39, has transformed the room into a paradise for the tree-dwelling animal, more commonly found in the tropical rainforests of South and Central America.
Mad about the mammals, famous for their slow movements, Jenni – who bought six-year-old Enzo for £4,520 12 months ago, said: “Sloths need heat and humidity and I realised that, with the right kind of equipment, you can keep them pretty much anywhere.”
Longing for a pet sloth since childhood, after reading about them in the National Geographic magazine, Jenni – who has 11 other unusual pets, including a hedgehog, two sugar gliders, which are marsupials, and two giant Flemish rabbits – finally bought Enzo from a woman in Kentucky nearly 500 miles away.
And in February 2018, she and her husband set out to collect him, having spent £380 and 20 hours kitting out their spare room, previously their oldest daughter’s bedroom before she left to go to university, with an infrared heater and cool mist humidifier, along with ropes and towers for him to climb on.
“Bringing him back in the car inside a crate I remember feeling excited, but so nervous about looking after him,” she said.
“I’d wanted a sloth for so long and we’d done everything we could to make our home right for him. But you just have to hope it works out.”
A year on, Enzo – who is a two-toed sloth, bred in captivity – is very much part of the family, although Jenni admits they have a way to go before he is fully domesticated.
“He doesn’t like to be picked up,” she explained. “He’ll move away from you if you try to do so.
“He is also yet to meet the rest of the animals in our home and, at the moment, only stays in the spare bedroom, which is three metres by three-and-a-half metres and has one window.
“But we don’t want to rush him at all and our aim is to make him as relaxed with his environment as possible.”
A massive animal lover, Jenni already had her sugar gliders, giant bunnies, two Shar Pei dogs and a Labrador-cross, two guinea pigs, a hedgehog and a black cat when, around six years ago, she first saw sloths being sold on the internet.
But Terry was not keen, standing firm until 2016, when the couple saw one in the flesh for the first time on a trip to Greenville Zoo, Wisconsin, and he too instantly fell in love with the unusual animals with very slow metabolisms.
“Terry was amazed that the sloth seemed so interested in us. It was genuinely curious about us and wanted to interact with us,” recalled Jenni.
She added: “That sealed the deal for him and after that he was totally on board.”
So, the couple began researching how to make their home sloth-friendly and once they were satisfied they could give one the right environment to be happy and healthy, they began looking for sellers on special websites for exotic pets.
After several months they came across Enzo, whose owner felt she no longer had the time to dedicate to looking after him.
“We had initially been looking for a baby sloth, but these sell for around $12,000 (£9,194) which is a lot of money,” said Jenni.
“Then Enzo, who was already five-years-old, came up. He was costing around half that, and because of the fact that his owner could no longer look after him, we felt like we were giving a home to an animal in need.”
After contacting the owner, the couple took their children to visit Enzo on their way home from a trip to Disneyworld, Florida, and immediately knew he was the sloth for them.
Jenni, who has a daughter Bianca, 19, and two younger boys, who she does not wish to name, explained: “We arrived during the daytime when, because sloths are nocturnal creatures, he was asleep.
“But, hearing that we were there, he woke up and came over to say hello and we all thought, ‘Yes, this guy’s cool!'”
They agreed a price and four weeks later made the eight-hour journey to Kentucky to collect their new pet, having transformed their spare bedroom into a hot and sticky jungle-gym.
Once home, they put some of his old play towers from his previous place in his new room and left him to acclimatise to his surroundings.
“It took him about a month to fully settle in,” recalled Jenni, who had to have him checked by a vet for any diseases before he was allowed into the state of Wisconsin.
“At first he spent a lot of his time on top of the tower that we had brought with us from Kentucky.”
She continued: “But, after a while, he started exploring the room more and sleeping on the top shelf of a re-purposed closet with the doors taken off that we had put in there.”
As well as a new environment, Enzo also had to adapt to a new diet that Jenni decided to put him on.
Previously, he had lived only on sweet potatoes, but Jenni gave him special leafeater biscuits, after being advised that zoos fed them to their sloths, as the nutritional content was closer to that of their natural diet in the wild.
“He still loves his sweet potatoes, though, and I still give him a few each day,” laughed Jenni, who feeds him once a day.
While Enzo does not like being picked up, he is very friendly and always comes to greet visitors to his room, even pawing and sometimes licking Jenni and the family.
“He really has a personality and is very good with humans,” she said. “He licks me on the nose like a dog quite often and tries to put his arms around me as though he’s hugging.”
She continued: “Bianca, my eldest daughter, has a really special connection with him too, but the younger ones don’t seem that fussed about him.
“I think they’re too young to really understand how unusual and amazing it is to have a sloth living in your house!”
Whiling away his waking hours, between around 4pm and 6am, swinging from his ropes and climbing frames and playing with his numerous stuffed toys, Enzo is also an aspiring painter.
Placing a paintbrush between his toes and a canvas beneath him, Jenni watches as the creature knocks out abstract artworks, which she later sells for £15 at charity events.
“It isn’t super-intentional, but he seems to enjoy doing it and will only do it when he’s in a good mood and feeling happy,” she said.
As pets go, sloths are remarkably easy to look after, as they only need to go to the toilet every week or so, due to their slow metabolism, and added to that Enzo is house-trained, knowing to do his business in a special crate in the corner of the room, which Jenni then mucks out.
So far, Jenni has been nervous of introducing him to the other family pets in case they scare him, although she is hoping that, one day, he will be confident enough to meet them and even to go outside.
Jenni continued: “Sloths are quite easy to look after and don’t require much attention like a dog does.
“Though he is sociable, he’s very happy sitting in his room and can amuse himself very easily by swinging from his perches and looking out of the window.”
She continued: “The big commitment is the fact that they live until they are 30.
“There is a bit of a fad at the moment for sloths and I think in a couple of years time there will be lots of them needing new homes, as people don’t quite realise that you’re going to have to look after them for a very long time.
“But with Enzo we are very much prepared for the commitment and are overjoyed that he will be with us for many years to come.”
