Meet Vanilla, the chimp spent the start of her life in a biomedical research laboratory.
She lived in New York’s infamous Laboratory for Experimental Medicine and Surgery in Primates until she was two-years-old.
Here, the chimpanzees tended to be housed in 5’x5’x7’ cages suspended above the ground.
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In 1995, she was transferred with a group to California, where she was placed in a larger enclosure at the Wildlife Waystation.
In total, Vanilla spent over two decades in these cages and enclosures before she finally got to see the open sky.
And shocking footage previously went viral when the 29-year-old chimp stepped out into the sunlight and looks up to the sky for the first time.
People say the video ‘breaks their heart’ as it’s ‘so beautiful to see her expression’.
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Now aged 30, Vanilla was among the final seven chimpanzees to be re-homed from the Wildlife Waystation when it closed.
In 2022, Save the Chimps arranged for FedEx to fly her and her group across the country to Florida.
They were then driven from Orlanda by Pero Family Farms in a climate-controlled semi-truck to the 150-acre sanctuary.
She was then placed in quarantine with the other new chimps before being introduced with her family to one of the larger family groups.
“I am now fully integrated into the group and we have a 3-acre island to explore and the freedom to choose where and how to spend our days,” Vanilla’s page reads on the chimpanzee sanctuary’s site.
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In the heart-warming video, she appears apprehensive about stepping outside for the first time, but was helped by alpha male Dwight, who greeted her with a huge as she jumped out of the enclosure.
She then looked upward to the open sky for the first time, appearing amazed as the sunlight flooded her face.
“My first time outside, I was in awe of the open sky, a sight I had never seen in my life as my former homes had cage tops,” it explains. “I enjoy exploring the island and relaxing and grooming with my family on the island.”
Save the Chimps’ primatologist Dr. Andrew Halloran explained to New York Post: “In California, Vanilla lived with a handful of chimps inside a chain-link fence cage with no grass and very little enrichment.”
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All of her previous homes had caging at the top, so she’d never taken in the vast open sky.
Halloran added that Vanilla is ‘settling in very well’ and has particularly been getting on well with her match Dwight.
Save the Chimps is one of the largest chimpanzee sanctuaries in the world and offers life long care for chimps rescued form research labs, the pet trade and entertainment industry.
Jess Battison