The invitation is blunt about its own pace: "Slow Down & Get Wild for Sloth Day." On Saturday, October 17, 2026, from 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., the Harris County Public Library and Wild Animal Safari in Pine Mountain are teaming up for an afternoon built around the world's most famously unhurried mammal. There will be a Sloth Story Time, a take-home craft, and up-close encounters with sloths and other animals. The price of admission is not money. It is a completed children's reading log.
The mechanics work like this: families stop by the Harris County Public Library, at 7511 Georgia Highway 116 in Hamilton, and pick up a children's reading log. Kids read, fill the log in, and return it to the library. That completed log earns a free ticket to the Sloth Day event at the safari park. It is a straightforward trade — pages for a pass.
The library system frames the offer as the Safari Reading Challenge, one of several reading challenges it runs across its branches. The challenge's stated purpose is simple: "Read to earn a pass to Wild Animal Safari in Pine Mountain GA." It sits alongside other regional programs, including a 1,000 Books Before Kindergarten effort and a Harris County botanical garden challenge in which children ages 4 to 17 read five books and receive a ticket to the Columbus Botanical Garden. The library also runs a Georgia Reads for America 250 challenge through Beanstack, the digital reading platform many public libraries use to track minutes and books. The safari log, though, is a paper-and-crayon affair — stop by the branch, get the log, bring it back.
Wild Animal Safari is an unusual partner for a story hour, and that is part of the appeal. The park sits on 500 acres about 50 miles south of Atlanta, tucked between Callaway Gardens and LaGrange in southwest Georgia. It opened in 1991 and has spent more than three decades building a reputation as a drive-through safari — the kind of place where you stay in your car and zebras, llamas, bison, camels, and giraffes come to the window. The park markets itself as the "Serengeti of the South," and its three-mile drive-through loop is designed to let visitors feed and touch animals from their own vehicle, a rental van, or a seasonal guided tour bus.
But the drive-through is only half of it. The park's Walkabout Adventure Zoo is the walk-through section, and it is where the sloths live — alongside lions, hyenas, capybaras, monkeys, and reptiles. General admission covers both the drive-through safari and the walkabout zoo, and tickets are good for the whole day, so a family could conceivably do the loop in the morning and meet the sloths in the afternoon.
For visitors who want more than a look through glass, the park sells private Animal Encounters, booked at least 24 hours in advance and capped at four people per time slot. The Sloth Encounter, open to ages 5 and up, lets guests meet and feed one of the park's sloths while a keeper talks about the animal's behavior, habitat, and conservation. There are also encounters with reptiles, capybaras, and hedgehogs. The park is careful to note that available animals are subject to change — "even animals can have a bad day," its booking page explains, and animals are evaluated each day for whether they are up to meeting people.
That caveat is a small reminder that sloths are not party animals by temperament. They are tree-dwelling mammals native to the forests of Central and South America, and their reputation for slowness is not an exaggeration: they move deliberately, sleep a great deal, and do much of their living upside down. The park's own promotional images show a sloth eating a snack while hanging inverted. Sloths have become a genuine pop-culture fixation in recent years, and they have an official holiday — International Sloth Day falls on October 20, which the Sloth Conservation Foundation promotes as a fixed date to help schools and conservation groups plan around it. The Harris County event lands a few days ahead of that date, which is presumably no accident.
What makes the Sloth Day arrangement notable is the crossover itself. Public libraries have long used summer reading programs and prize incentives to keep kids turning pages when school is out, and they have long partnered with local businesses for those prizes — pizza coupons, museum passes, ballgame tickets. A drive-through safari park is a different kind of carrot. The library branch sits in Hamilton, the county seat. Wild Animal Safari is one of the region's larger attractions, drawing day-trippers from Columbus, LaGrange, and Atlanta. The reading log turns the park into a reward that a kid can picture: not a coupon, but a sloth.
The event is listed for all ages, and the library's calendar describes it as an afternoon for "sloth superfans" and animal lovers alike — a way to celebrate reading, wildlife, and family fun at once. The park's regular hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily, so the 11:30-to-2:30 window sits comfortably inside a normal operating day. Families who want to make a full day of it can eat at the Safari Café or browse the gift shop between the drive-through loop and the walkabout zoo.
For anyone planning around it, the practical sequence matters: the free ticket comes from the library, not the park, and it requires a completed reading log returned to the Harris County Public Library in Hamilton. The event itself happens at Wild Animal Safari, 1300 Oak Grove Road in Pine Mountain — a different address from the library listed on the event page. In other words, the reading happens in Hamilton, and the sloth happens in Pine Mountain. Bring the log, and bring a little patience. The whole point is to take it slow.