Nick Pyenson

Holy moly.

You are really beautiful.

How old is she now?

It was emotional and wonderful and joyous.

Seeing Sheba just made all my memories of all the Oklahoma chimps rush into my heart.

For many years, Sheba had to endure a lot of things that were not fair and were not right and needed to be changed.

and Sheba was looking at us, you know, knowing, hey, everything's okay.

That's been a crazy journey, huh?

You had a long way to come to the promised land.

It's a thrill for me to be able to see them here and to know that they are here, they're safe.

Yeah, so I mean, it's just nice seeing them living like they're meant to, interacting with other chimps.

At the time, I was actually working in a biomedical research facility with chimpanzees doing behavioral research.

Back in the late 80s and early 90s, chimpanzees were mostly being used in HIV and AIDS research.

And chimpanzees actually didn't turn out to be a great model for AIDS.

And so the funding was sort of falling off for that type of research.

Chimpanzees are a long-lived species.

They live into their 60s sometimes, and they're very expensive to care for.

And so myself and my co-founders wanted to provide a solution to this need for sanctuary for chimpanzees being retired from biomedical research.

Yeah, I think with the chimps that we have here, their behaviors in many ways are like those in the wild.

We see the different vocalizations that they use.