An exotic animal exhibitor whose sloth-encounters business was shuttered by New York courts is attempting to relaunch his operations in Florida, right as the state grapples with the fallout from sloth deaths at a different tourist attraction.
Government inspectors repeatedly found problems at Larry Wallach’s earlier businesses, including unsafe and unsanitary conditions for his sloths, kangaroos, tigers and capybaras, according to federal and state government records obtained by Inside Climate News. He continued operating his Long Island sloth business for more than a year after a 2023 court order to immediately close the location because of zoning violations, and the federal government declined to issue him a new wildlife-exhibition license in 2024.
Now, Wallach has filed paperwork in Florida to run a new pet store and encounter business called Wildlife Adventures, featuring sloths, kangaroos, reptiles and birds. On Sunday, he told Inside Climate News in a text message that he expects to open the business in two weeks.
To animal law experts and welfare groups, Wallach’s attempted comeback highlights broader shortcomings in oversight of exotic animal exhibitors. They argue that weak laws and limited enforcement allow repeat offenders to continue acquiring animals, profiting from them and violating the law.
Wallach—clutching a live sloth—appeared last month before the Margate City Commission, 25 miles north of Miami, to pitch the proposed business.
“I’ve been raising animals since I was like 15—tigers, bears, lions, everything,” Wallach said. “But my real love is for sloths, and I’m looking to open up a store in Margate that would almost be very, very educational.”
Sloths, tree-dwelling mammals from the tropical rainforests of South America, are extremely ill-suited to captivity, scientists say.
Wallach’s proposal comes as Florida officials are scrutinizing the commercial sloth trade following an Inside Climate News investigation in April into Sloth World, a separate planned tourist attraction that imported dozens of sloths from Peru and Guyana. More than 50 of those animals died. In May, state officials temporarily halted sloth imports and said they were pursuing a criminal investigation.
Wallach was not involved in that business. He told Inside Climate News he has owned 11 sloths and conducted between 25,000 and 30,000 public encounters with the animals over several years in New York. He said he would like to acquire more sloths to have about 20 at his new business.
He also asserted that all of his sloths are captive-bred rather than imported from the wild and that his animals are well-suited for captivity. He declined to provide the names of the breeders or verification of the sloths’ origin. State import records list Wallach as the recipient of two sloths brought into Florida in August 2025.
Wallach told Inside Climate News those sloths were imported into Florida from another U.S. state. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission did not respond to multiple requests for clarification, but did say it approved Wallach’s state license to display wildlife to the public.
The agency “is aware of Wallach’s history of exhibiting wildlife outside the state and FWC investigators continue to monitor the situation actively,” a spokesperson said in a written statement to Inside Climate News, adding: “Any violations will be investigated and addressed immediately.”
Exotic animal exhibitors like Wallach must also obtain federal approval and are routinely inspected by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The USDA told Inside Climate News that Wallach no longer has a federal license after the agency denied his application for a new one in 2024 based on an Animal Welfare Act regulation that requires the USDA to deny licensing to applicants who have made false statements, violated the law, entered a plea of no contest to government allegations “or is otherwise unfit to be licensed.”
Harold Somer, one of Wallach’s attorneys, told Inside Climate News that his client’s 2024 license application was denied because the “USDA had clearly been relying on unverified and incorrect information fed to it by others.”
Wallach told Inside Climate News that he is now applying for another federal license and expects to get it, a point his attorney reiterated in a written statement.
Wallach has been in the exotic animal exhibition business for decades. His early businesses—from a traveling menagerie to an Ohio mall storefront—featured tigers and other big cats. Wallach opened his Long Island “Sloth Encounters” store in 2022. Throughout, Wallach has accrued dozens of infractions in USDA inspection reports, some the agency considered serious.
Somer said his client appealed some USDA inspection reports, but those appeals were denied. “At no time while I have known Larry was he ever charged with animal cruelty by any government agency,” Somer said in an email to Inside Climate News.
In a series of wide-ranging interviews, Wallach described himself as a hands-on practitioner with a mission to educate the public about animals. He contended that USDA inspection reports have been misrepresented by critics and that enforcement standards vary from inspector to inspector. His animals, he said, are like his children.
“I can look at a sloth by its coat and tell you what it’s lacking,” he said.
He pointed to the federal and state licenses he held over the years as evidence that he met legal requirements and blamed the recurring regulatory issues he’s faced on animal welfare groups, which he disparaged.
“They can make me look like this piece of shit,” he said. “They think they’re going to just run me down. They’re very mistaken, they don’t know how deep our pockets are. … I happen to be a really good animal person.”
Crying Tigers and a License Suspension
Under U.S. law, animals are generally treated as property, leaving their welfare largely dependent on a patchwork of federal, state and local laws. The centerpiece of that framework is the federal Animal Welfare Act, which sets minimum standards of care for certain animals.
Animal welfare experts, along with many lawyers and veterinarians, say that the USDA has a multi-decade history of failing to adequately enforce that law, with violators often receiving only warnings. The USDA’s own watchdog has repeatedly underscored those concerns, most recently finding that limited staffing and resources have further hindered enforcement.
According to the Congressional Research Service, as of March last year the USDA had just 115 inspectors and supervisors responsible for overseeing more than 12,000 organizations and individuals regulated under the Animal Welfare Act and another law, the Horse Protection Act. Between March 2025 and April 2026, its Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), in which those inspectors work, lost about 21 percent of its staff, according to an Inside Climate News analysis of federal employment data. “APHIS is actively hiring Veterinary Medical Officers and other staff positions,” a USDA spokesperson said.
Delcianna Winders, director of the Animal Law and Policy Institute at Vermont Law and Graduate School, said Wallach’s history mirrors the agency’s shortcomings.
“He is someone who has openly defied the law, who has thumbed his nose at the USDA, and they’ve never taken meaningful action,” said Winders, who has tracked Wallach’s operations for years as part of a coalition of lawyers and animal protection groups, compiling complaints, monitoring his exhibits and pressing the USDA to act.
Winders said the USDA should treat Wallach’s ongoing exhibiting without a federal license—documented in videos and on his website—as a clear violation, refuse to relicense him and refer his case to prosecutors for stronger enforcement instead of issuing more warnings. The USDA is legally required to refer serious cases to the Department of Justice and, in Winders’ view, Wallach’s case meets that threshold.
But she said the USDA disregards that mandate, while the Justice Department’s capacity to pursue animal welfare cases has dwindled. “They’re just not using that authority now,” she said.
A USDA spokesperson said that when license holders violate the law, the agency works to bring them back into compliance quickly using enforcement actions “such as letters of warning, monetary penalties, license suspensions and revocations.” Wallach described prosecution as an outlandish suggestion in his case and said that “animal rights people just create havoc.”
He contended that he is permitted to exhibit animals through other people’s licenses. Asked to clarify whether that is correct, the USDA declined to say beyond noting that licenses are issued to specific persons, for specific activities and to approved sites.
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USDA inspection reports flagging problems with Wallach’s exhibitions accumulated for years before regulators temporarily suspended his license in 2013. Inspectors continued to document problems after his license reinstatement, eventually giving him an “official warning” in 2024 for mishandling animals.
As far back as 2003, USDA inspectors reported that animals were stored in unsafe conditions at Wallach’s then-home in East Rockaway, New York, where tigers, lions, bears and other exotic wildlife could be found in his garage and on his back porch. Those reports also show that he lacked documentation tracking how his animals were acquired, sold or disposed of, inspectors wrote.
Wallach told Inside Climate News that the fencing around his animals at his former home in Long Island complied with USDA requirements until the agency changed its regulations and he typically addressed inspection issues the same day.
Federal officials detailed public safety hazards such as displaying a juvenile tiger in an open-top, unlocked enclosure during a 2008 public exhibition in South Carolina. Members of the public were allowed to lean into the enclosure and handle the tethered animal’s head and neck, regulators alleged in court records.
In 2010, one of Wallach’s tigers “was observed to be visibly upset and exhibited stress and discomfort by crying, and rubbing its body against the cage’s sides, and the tiger was observed to continue to have lesions on its nose from abrading against the enclosure wire,” according to the court records. Another USDA report documented a similar incident with a tiger cub the same year.
Asked about this, Wallach told Inside Climate News that a tiger rubbing up against its fencing is not upset.
“That’s a tiger that’s happy and just like scratching his own body,” he said.
Denise Flores worked for Wallach at his Ohio mall storefront, where in the early 2000s shoppers could have their photos taken with tigers and other animals. She described a high-volume business model where animals were on display throughout the mall’s operating hours with little or no breaks.
“I just thought it was too much,” Flores said.
In 2013 the USDA suspended Wallach’s exhibitor license for six months for Animal Welfare Act violations across multiple states, including Florida. Wallach agreed to the suspension without admitting or denying the allegations, court records show.
Government officials said in those records that Wallach had “not shown good faith” in his dealings with them, and they described serious violations. Among them: a failure to provide adequate nutrition and veterinary care to tigers, one of which had hair loss and neurological problems.
Wallach denied his animals lacked proper nutrition.
“None of my animals ever had issues,” he said. “For them to say nutrition, that’s total bullshit, because if you saw my food bill and what I’ve spent on them, you’d know something’s not kosher.”
New York regulators identified problems, too. In 2016, the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation penalized him for allowing prohibited public contact with a tiger cub and possessing the animal without a license, according to the agency. The DEC cited Wallach again in 2020 for similar violations.
Three years later, he pleaded guilty to a New York violation-level offense involving the commercial sale of protected Nile monitor lizards. Wallach told Inside Climate News his distributor was to blame.
Encountering Sloths
Wallach opened Sloth Encounters in 2022 in a sprawling Long Island suburb about 50 miles east of Manhattan, where strip malls and warehouses mark a landscape far from the tropical forests where sloths live.
There, he converted a former pool-supply location into a pet store and sloth encounter room surrounded by chain-link fencing and filled with wooden branches, artificial vines and LED strip lights, according to court documents, photographs and Nicole Rice, a former employee. Inside, customers could get up close to the sloths for $50 a person.
Sloths inside an enclosure at Larry Wallach’s Sloth Encounters store. Credit: Nicole Rice
USDA inspectors continued raising concerns. In 2023 the agency documented signs of stress in sloths during public encounters, improper handling of a juvenile kangaroo and environmental conditions deemed unsuitable for a sloth’s care.
A 2024 inspection report, based on video evidence from a Humane World for Animals investigation, said an employee repeatedly struck a sloth with a spray bottle while attempting to separate it from another sloth.
At the time, at least four visitors were inside the enclosure with seven sloths. One sloth, the report said, fell to the ground. Another sustained injuries around its nose and mouth. Inspectors noted Wallach was also filmed grabbing distressed sloths by the back of the neck.
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Wallach told Inside Climate News that he believes grabbing sloths there is a safe way to restrain them. He also recalled the bottle incident, noting that two of his larger male sloths were fighting and “can do a lot of damage to each other.”
“The girl who was hitting the sloths with the bottle was doing exactly what she should have done,” he added.
Federal inspection records also showed that the facility had a black fly infestation “in the store front (housing the capybaras and kangaroo), sloth exhibit area, and kitchen,” and that multiple defects posed a danger to animals. There were sharp edges in the kangaroo enclosure, for instance, and damage to the artificial grass floor of the capybara enclosure, inspectors said in January 2024. Wallach defended conditions at the location, saying they were pristine and customers gave him high ratings.
Government officials also documented misleading statements.
In 2022, federal inspectors questioned Wallach after receiving a complaint about a sloth bite at his store. Wallach denied that any visitor had been bitten during a sloth encounter, according to a USDA inspection report.
That report says inspectors later obtained records from the county health department confirming that a customer had been “bitten and/or scratched” by a sloth—the department issued an order requiring that the sloth be confined for 30 days for observation for rabies symptoms, which Wallach signed nearly two weeks before he denied the incident to inspectors. Wallach told Inside Climate News that he signed the order to avoid consequences for the sloth.
USDA officials also wrote that Wallach told inspectors his customers feed sloths using tongs, despite social media photos posted days later appearing to show children and adults feeding the animals by hand.
In Sloth Encounters’ final 14 months, Wallach was operating it in defiance of a court order. The New York Supreme Court directed him in March 2023 to cease operations at the Islip store based on repeated violations of the city’s zoning laws, then held him in civil contempt for not following through. He said he closed the store in June 2024 when his USDA exhibitor license expired.
Rice, who said she was friends with Wallach’s daughter before working at Sloth Encounters, said she quit after a few months because she had serious concerns.
“It was just a money grab,” she said. “He wasn’t treating the animals well. … He wasn’t putting the animals first.”
One incident in which Wallach exhibited exotic animals after his federal license expired was at a recent elementary school graduation in Margate, Florida.
In a video posted to Facebook by Margate Commissioner Tommy Ruzzano on May 27, Wallach parades a sloth through a crowd of dozens of people alongside an armed Margate police officer holding a small blanket-wrapped kangaroo.
Ruzzano captioned the video: “A Kangaroo, a Sloth, a Cock a too and a partridge in a pair tree as Principal Thomas Schroeder would say! What a great graduation and thanks Larry Wallach for bringing the animals.”
Ruzzano did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
At the May 6 commission meeting where Wallach made his pitch to the council, Ruzzano introduced him as an animal lover with “every kind of animal license you could imagine.”
“We do a lot for communities,” Wallach said, standing at the microphone in ripped jeans and a short-sleeved shirt, a sloth clinging to his torso. “Best of all, what we do is hands-on.”
Inside Climate News’ Peter Aldhous contributed reporting to this story.
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Katie Surma is a reporter at Inside Climate News covering the rights of nature movement and international environmental justice. Her work has a strong focus on the intersection of human rights and the environment. Before joining ICN, she practiced law, specializing in commercial litigation. Her journalism work has been recognized by the Overseas Press Club, the Society of International Journalists, the Society of American Business Editors and Writers and others. Katie has a master’s degree in investigative journalism from Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism, an LLM in international rule of law and security from ASU’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, a J.D. from Duquesne University, and was a History of Art and Architecture major at the University of Pittsburgh. Katie lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.