UNUSUAL – The beginning of the rest of his life. Vanilla, a 28-year-old chimpanzee, has lived her entire life incarcerated in a pharmaceutical laboratory in New York, never seeing the light of day. However, for two weeks that life in captivity ended and she was placed in a Florida animal shelter, where she finally got to see the sky for the first time.
This triggered a deeply human reaction. The “Save the Chimps” sanctuary (which means “save the chimpanzees” in French), which just captured the animal, has in fact announced its arrival at the sanctuary on video and we discover a moving scene there: as you can see below.
Vanilla has her eyes wide open and seems particularly moved to find herself in the great outdoors. She is even welcomed with open arms by one of her colleagues.
A second wind
It must be said that this chimp has come a long way before arriving in Florida this month. Vanilla’s journey is detailed on the shelter’s website and we learn that she first came through Tuxedo, in upstate New York, where she lived in miserable conditions. “I spent my early years in a biomedical research lab in New York City, where chimpanzees were typically housed in cages that hung off the floor like birdcages,” says this first-person account.
Separated from her mother from birth, she was used for testing, probably for HIV research. “It was a horrible lab that was spurned by animal rights activists for decades,” one of the shelter’s caretakers, Dan Mathews, told the New York Post.
In 2019, this center closed, leaving Vanilla to seek refuge elsewhere. Four years later, in this sanctuary, she will finally be able to live a milder life without screens and artificial lights. “The chimpanzees there watched TV and never saw the light of day,” recalls Dan Mathews. Vanilla now lives with 220 other chimpanzees at the Florida shelter.
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