[Animals] See the moment a 28-year-old lab chimp glimpses the open sky for the 1st time

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Vanilla, a 28-year-old chimpanzee, has lived her entire life in captivity without an unobscured view of the sky. But now, a heartwarming new video shows the great ape seeing the sky for the first time at an island chimp sanctuary in Florida.

For a portion of her early life, Vanilla lived inside a New York biomedical research facility, where she and dozens of other chimps (Pan troglodytes) were housed in small cages "suspended from the ground like bird cages," according to a statement from Save the Chimps, a sanctuary in Fort Pierce, Florida, that rescued her and 29 of her peers.

After being removed from the New York facility in 1995, Vanilla and other captive chimps were shipped to the Wildlife Waystation, an animal rescue facility in California that shuttered in 2019, where she was boxed inside a roofed enclosure, cut off from the outside world, according to the Daily Mail.

"In California, Vanilla lived with a handful of chimps inside a chain-link-fence cage with no grass and very little enrichment," Andrew Halloran, a primatologist and director of Save the Chimps, told the New York Post. 

https://www.livescience.com/animals/land-mammals/see-the-moment-a-28-year-old-lab-chimp-glimpses-the-open-sky-for-the-1st-time