The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary

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Tags: UQP, winter-2011

The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary by Andrew Westoll

An edited excerpt from The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary, published by UQP

This is the story of a family of troubled animals who live on a farm in the French Canadian countryside.

It is the story of how these animals came to be so troubled and how they are slowly becoming less so, in their own particular ways, through the actions of a small group of people led by Gloria Grow.

When I say these animals are a family, I don’t mean they share a mother or father or brothers or sisters (although some of them surely do).

They are a family in the sense that any group of beings who have lived together, suffered together, and triumphed together becomes a family.

They are related in the way that we are all related to one another, and here lies the source of their great misfortune.

I first contacted Gloria in 1998, when I was a college biology student.

I wrote to inquire about volunteer opportunities at the Fauna Foundation, the sanctuary for rescued animals that Gloria had recently founded with her partner, a veterinarian named Richard Allan, on their 240-acre hobby farm near Chambly.

The foundation had recently been all over the local, national, and international news because it had just become the permanent retirement home for a very special group of chimpanzees.

At the time I was one of thousands of young biology students who, inspired by the usual suspects (Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, the breathless David Attenborough), would have done just about anything to get a job either working with or studying great apes — the orangutans, gorillas, bonobos, and chimpanzees most of us have seen only in a zoo or in the pages of National Geographic.

Andrew Westoll, UQP, RRP $34.95

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