The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary

Author/Guide: Andrew Westoll

Why a Booktrail?

2000s: The humans who look after the apes who others try to destroy.

ISBN: 978-0547737386
Genre: Non-Fiction

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What you need to know before your trail

This is a close and detailed look at the emotional and physical damage done to the apes in some of America’ s most notorious biomedical research labs.

This is also the story of the humans who look after them and provide them with refuge and, ultimately, their inherent right to dignity.

Gloria Grow has created a rehabilitation center like none other. Thirteen chimpanzees, rescued from zoos and medical testing laboratories, now call Fauna Sanctuary home. After decades of cruelty and deprivation, these resilient primates are finally free to eat, sleep, play, and roam in peace

Primatologist and author Andrew Westoll lived and worked at Fauna one summer, and The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary is his poignant testimony to the capacity of these animals to heal and to learn to be chimps again.

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Fauna Santuary

In 1997 Gloria Grow started a sanctuary for chimps retired from biomedical research on her farm outside Montreal.

Since the 1930s, Chimpanzees and other primates have been used for a series of scientific experiments and medical investigations but this is the humane side of the struggle to save them and not to take them from their natural habitat – whilst rescuing the ones that suffer this fate. Many people think that animals who grow up in cages or who are subjected to such treatment from an early age can’t suffer as they don’t know any different. This book will show how that is impossible.

This is the story of Gloria Crow and the volunteers who were and are dedicated to giving these primates a peaceful place to live out the rest of their lives. This is the story behind the story of medical and scientific experimentation. Caged and forced to endure inhumane conditions.

During his time at the sanctuary, he meets the chimps and gets to know and understand them. How chimps are a lot like us after all.

“But for those left behind, a small measure of solace might be found in the lessons that the chimps of Fauna Sanctuary have been teaching Gloria for more than a decade now: that no matter what kind of trauma we’ve been through, we all have the capacity to recover and help others heal”.