Primate sanctuaries house thousands of chimpanzees, orangutans, and other primates rescued from the pet trade and entertainment industry but face significant welfare challenges.
Primate sanctuaries represent the end point for animals whose lives began in profoundly traumatic circumstances — captured from the wild, kept in isolation, treated as entertainment or pets. The welfare challenge in sanctuaries is building genuine recovery from trauma and deprivation, enabling social bonds with conspecifics, and providing environments rich enough to engage primate intelligence. The best sanctuaries achieve remarkable transformations in traumatized animals, but the process is slow, expensive, and requires extraordinary expertise.