A 28-year-old chimpanzee who spent her entire life in a cage has seen the open sky for the first time at her new 3-acre (1.2-hectare) sanctuary home in Florida.
Vanilla was born in captivity and spent her first two years of life in a 5-foot- (1.5-meter-) square suspended cage at New York’s former biomedical research lab, the Laboratory for Experimental Medicine and Surgery in Primates (LEMSIP), which was closed in the mid-1990s. She knew nothing of soft grass, or the sky above, until late 2022 when she arrived at her forever home—Save the Chimps (STC) sanctuary in Fort Pierce, Florida.
