There is exactly one venomous primate on Earth, and it has enormous round eyes, a teddy bear face, and raises its arms above its head when threatened in a gesture that looks, to most people, like it is asking for a hug. It is not asking for a hug. It is preparing to deliver a venomous bite.
The slow loris produces venom by combining a secretion from a gland on its arm with saliva. When it raises its arms and licks the gland, it is mixing the two compounds in its mouth, charging the venom before biting. The bite delivers a cocktail that can cause anaphylactic shock in humans and is strong enough to cause tissue necrosis at the bite site. There are documented cases of people being hospitalized after slow loris bites, including wildlife researchers who underestimated the animal they were handling.
The venom is used defensively against predators and in competition with other slow lorises, but it also has a parental function. Mothers groom venom into their infants’ fur before leaving them alone while foraging, giving the infant a chemical defense against predators during the vulnerable hours when the mother is away. It is one of the more pragmatic forms of parental care documented in any primate.
What is killing the slow loris is a YouTube video. Or more precisely, the cumulative effect of many videos showing slow lorises in people’s homes, raising their arms when tickled, being hand-fed rice balls, sitting on cushions looking adorable. Those videos have been watched hundreds of millions of times and have driven enormous demand for slow lorises as pets across Southeast Asia and beyond. Anna Nekaris at Oxford Brookes University, who has spent decades studying slow lorises, has documented the direct link between viral videos and wildlife trafficking spikes for the species.
The slow loris you see in those videos is not raising its arms in pleasure. It is terrified, performing a defensive venom-deployment posture in response to being handled. Before it reaches the camera, its teeth have almost certainly been clipped or pulled without anesthesia, because a venomous primate biting its owner is a commercial liability. The videos of cute lorises are videos of traumatized, mutilated animals in distress, performing a fear response that their human owners mistake for happiness.
Slow lorises are nocturnal, solitary, and dependent on intact forest in Southeast Asia, a region where forest loss has been faster and more extensive than almost anywhere else on Earth. They move slowly and have small home ranges, which makes them sensitive to fragmentation. A slow loris cannot cross a cleared field the way a bird can cross open sky.
The combination of habitat loss and wildlife trafficking has pushed several slow loris species to the edge. The Javan slow loris is Critically Endangered. The Sumatran slow loris is Endangered. The animal that the internet thinks is cute is running out of forest and running out of time, and the people who love it most are the ones causing the most damage.