Every single great ape that comes in here has a story.

This is their home.

This is their sanctuary.

They're here to be chimpanzees and orangutans.

That's the whole purpose of this place.

[music] The center for Great Apes is a magical place.

It's a permanent home for these guys where they can live out their lives surrounded by tranquility and love and patience.

So they basically retire to Florida, like a lot of humans do.

[music] We are a nonprofit sanctuary for orangutans and chimpanzees who have come out of entertainment.

The exotic pet trade.

Biomedical research.

I started the Center for Great Apes in 1993, after volunteering for three years at a tourist attraction in Miami.

And someone at the tourist attraction had a baby orangutan named Pongo, and they asked me to take care of it.

So I thought, well, let me find a good home.

But it's very difficult to put a hand-raised orangutan or chimpanzee in with a zoo group.

And in 1993, there were no sanctuaries in this country, in North America for orangutans and only one for chimps in Texas.

And I thought, well, how hard can this be?

I'm just going to start a sanctuary.

[music] That first little infant that I volunteered to take care of, Pongo is now going to be 35 this summer.

Okay.

Is that good?

Congo?

Is that good?

Currently, we have 66 great apes at the sanctuary, 27 orangutans and 39 chimpanzees.

We've had some that are more famous than others.

For instance, Michael Jackson's chimp bubbles.

Bubbles, as most of you know, is a very famous chimpanzee that lived with Michael Jackson when he was small.

Michael Jackson had him for a few years.

The thing is, with great apes, when they're small, you can take them places, work with them.

But as they get bigger, I would say seven years old, probably, they start to get really, really strong.

Chimpanzees are about five times stronger than the average human male.

Once they get to a certain age, a certain level of strength, they just can't be handled anymore.

And so that's where we step in.

[music] He doesn't care that much about me right now.

He's so interested in what you guys are doing.

Every single great ape that comes in here has a story.

One of the stories that was a surprise was an orangutan, Sandra, from South America.

There was this situation in Buenos Aires of an orangutan who was alone in a small inner city zoo, and some animal welfare advocates sued for her rights to have a better life, and she was declared a person.

What that means is that she is not an object.

She has rights as a person, non-human personhood status.

So the judge declared that Sandra could not go to a zoo.

She had to come to a sanctuary.

There are other suits going on around the world suing for elephants, for killer whales, the higher intelligent animals to be treated with more respect and have more choices.

So that was a groundbreaking legal case for great apes in captivity.

When people are aware of, you know why we do what we do, why we have to do what we do, then I think that helps spread awareness around so that we can eventually not need to exist anymore, so that apes are not in that situation in the first place.

All right, Mari, we open.

One of our most iconic residents here is Mari, who is a 44 year old orangutan.

Mari lost her arms in an accident that happened when she was 12 weeks old.

She was in a cognitive research situation in Georgia for 20 years.

After that, she worked on computers and she learned something called lexigrams, which are a symbol for a word.

And when I was bringing Mari down, I was cutting apples to give her in her crate.

And I knew nothing about the lexigrams, but they'd given me these big charts.

So I'm just sort of saying, Mari, what is this?

And she brings her toe out right to that chart of 100 signs.

Apple.

Oh my gosh, she definitely knows them.

And I said, Mari, what else do you want?

Brings her toe back in.

M&M's good.

We actually call her Handicapable because she's very smart and she does whatever she wants to do here.

Hi.

Can you open?

I love this job, but it's also hard.

It's really hard.

It's you develop relationships with these guys, really strong relationships, and then you lose them sometimes.

We know that they're all going to pass here and we have to deal with that every time.

And it's very difficult.

But the reward is giving them this life.

Clyde, who is no longer with us.

We rescued him when he was 45 from a cage in a garage in Dayton, Ohio.

He had never seen the light of day.

The last time he saw a chimp was when his mother was killed.

And they captured him for the trade.

He couldn't walk.

He was emaciated, just skeletal.

And it was heartbreaking.

[music] We would build his nest for him every day, and he'd go and lay in the sun and just sleep all day.

And I thought, even if he only lives three months here, he will have spent the last three months of his life in sunshine and lying in a nest.

Well, after a year he had turned the nice dark chimp color he'd filled out.

He met a female here named toddy, who was also wild caught in Africa.

And it was a love story.

[music] It's emotional to talk about it because every ape here is so special to us.

It is what we are trying to do here, to give them a dignity and a quality of life with their own companions and just some sense of being a chimp or an orangutan.

[music] These guys are all very people oriented.

If they were to go into the wild, they would probably seek out humans to help them.

And humans are the number one predator in the world, so unfortunately they don't have the ability to be able to be returned to the wild.

We can't replicate the wild 100%, but we try to do everything that we can.

That's how we came up with the idea of these large structures that you see here.

They're between 20 and 40ft tall, very, very large habitats that they live in.

They also have concrete night houses that really come in handy in hurricane season, especially one of our most unique things that we have here is our aerial trailway system.

It's around two miles of aerial trailways that connect every single enclosure, every single building in the sanctuary.

In the trailways, there's doors all the way around so that not all the chimps are in the same two miles.

They have different sections, and they rotate, so they always have options to go other places.

It's super enriching for us to be able to move them around and give them new spaces.

So our trailways really give us that opportunity to be able to send them different directions and to hang out with different friends for the day.

We do not breed.

It is not within our ethics to breed here at the sanctuary.

And that is we're not trying to put more grapes into captivity.

But right before Covid, we went out one morning early to shift the orangutans outside, and all of a sudden we looked up and there was this tiny baby on the belly of sunshine, who was in her late 30s at the time.

After the initial shock wore off, I was overwhelmed by emotion because I was like, this is a redeeming moment for her.

I thought, I'm going to cry now.

She had three infants previously before she came here.

All of them were taken from her to be raised by humans.

So she finally had the opportunity to raise her own baby.

[music] We actually named her Cahaya, which is the Indonesian word for radiant or light.

Even though, you know, we're like, oh my gosh, we have to tell people we had an accidental baby.

Um, it was beautiful.

We have this environmental enrichment plan, you know, to enhance the physical, cognitive and emotional health.

Today, we have 44 paid staff and about 50 volunteers.

Because we have grown so big, we've taken in over 80 great apes in our 31 years.

The biggest part of our staff are the caregivers that carry on all the activities for the apes during the day.

So everybody goes to their night house where they're working that day, and take a look at the apes, and they will give out any special vitamins or medications that each individual might need.

They look them over to make sure everybody is healthy and good in the morning.

Open.

Good.

[music] We do have a really nice veterinary clinic here on grounds.

[music] It's really important that we maintain their health care.

We do a lot of enclosure side health care training so we can get those diagnostics done without having to anesthetize them.

[music] We have individualized diets for every single ape.

Every single ape has their own specific diet.

We serve three leafy greens a day three fruits, three veggies, and three starches.

Each ape has their own specialized diet based on gender, health, species, and special dietary needs.

[music] I've been doing this for 15 years, and there's not a day that goes by that I'm not amazed at how smart they are.

Great apes actually know a lot more spoken English in our case, because that's what we speak than than we even know.

[music] Is your tongue?

I've seen over and over again their ability to be compassionate towards one another, something that you don't see in a lot of species.

[music] A huge part of our day is focused on enrichment.

Over here.

This will hang on the outside of the enclosure.

The challenge is they have to get the treats out and they'll work at that for a while.

We want to stimulate them so they just don't say, here's your food and here's you know, nothing to do.

[music] We encourage tool use because they're one of the only species that use tools.

One of the favorite things is.

Butcher paper.

We have all different color butcher paper and they will make nests with it.

They'll wear it.

They the baby loves to play in this stuff.

We're always trying to stay on top of coming up with new ideas ourselves, so that we can really give these guys the best life that we can.

[music] Thank you.

It is.

It's a joy and it's a privilege.

I feel so privileged to have had this open up in my life, and it's not something that I've done and done myself.

It's something that has been done by all the volunteers and staff and supporters that have helped us along the way, and that is very rewarding.

Every day when I come to work, I'm like, man, I'm so lucky to get to do this.

Still to this day, every every once in a while, I'll be sitting with one of the chimps or orangutans and it'll just hit me.

I'm like, whoa, this is my life.

What am I doing right now?

I'm just hanging out with this chimp like they're my best friend.

I think it's the best job in the world, and I wouldn't trade it for anything.

[music]