By Charlie Herbert

She had spent her entire life in a cage

This is the moment a chimp who had spent her entire life caged up saw the open sky for the first time. Vanilla the chimp had been raised as part of an animal testing programme at New York’s Laboratory for Experimental Medicine and Surgery in Primates (LEMSIP). LEMSIP once housed hundreds of chimps and monkeys in awful conditions before it closed in 1996. Vanilla had been a victim at the facility in the two years before its closure. She was then moved to the Wildlife Waystation in California, a much larger enclosure. But here she was still in a “chain-link fence cage with no grass and very little enrichment.” [caption id="attachment_583460" align="alignnone" width="1314"] Credit: Save the Chimps[/caption] 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.” In 2019, the Wildlife Waystation went out of business though, meaning that Vanilla had to be relocated again, along with 42 other chimps. [caption id="attachment_583461" align="alignnone" width="1314"] Credit: Save the Chimps[/caption] She ended up being among the final seven to be re-home, but thanks to the FedEx Cares program she was flown across the US to a sanctuary in Fort Pierce, Florida. Her profile explains: “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.” Footage of Vanilla meeting seeing her new surroundings was shared, and shows the 29-year-old chimp gazing up in awe at the sky as she explores her new surroundings.