The heartwarming moment a chimpanzee survivor of a grisly laboratory experience programme was welcomed into her new home has been caught on camera. Vanilla the chimp looked happy as she looked up at the sky in her new home at a sancturary in Fort Pierce, Florida. The 29-year-old chimp was once a victim of the Laboratory for Experimental Medicine and Surgery in Primates (LEMSIP) in New York.
LEMSIP once houses roughly 300 chimps and a further 300 monkeys before being closed down in 1996, reports the Mirror.
Chimps like Vanilla were denied outdoor access and kept in small cages, according to advocates for the animal Project R&R.
Vanilla lived there until she was two before she was taken to the Wildlife Waystation in California, a much larger enclosure.
Her Save the Chimps profile reads: “I spent my early years in a biomedical research laboratory in New York where chimpanzees were commonly housed in 5’x5’x7’ cages suspended from the ground like bird cages. I was among thirty chimpanzees to be sent to the Wildlife Waystation in 1995 where I joined a small family group.”
She was kept there until 2019 when the refuge went out of business and was threatened by a number of wildfires in the area.
The profile explained: “In 2019, the Wildlife Waystation closed, causing nearly 480 animals to need to be re-homed, including 42 chimpanzees.
“I was among the final seven to be re-homed, and my family and I made the cross-country trip to Florida in a FedEx airplane, thanks to the FedEx Cares program. From Orlando, Pero Family Farms generously drove us to the sanctuary in a climate-controlled semi-truck.
“It took a lot of devoted people to make our move to Florida possible and now I look forward to calling this my forever home.”
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