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ANNIE MARIE MUSSELMAN

Kate Thompson, a Wildlife Waystation board member, relies largely on the generosity of donors to pay the abandoned sanctuary’s nine remaining staff. When the chimps were surrendered, the sanctuary didn’t require their former owners to contribute to their lifelong care. “You shouldn’t be legally allowed to have an animal unless there’s a whole plan—you don’t just get to throw it away,” she says.

By the end of the year, all the Wildlife Waystation chimps will be transferred to accredited sanctuaries. Losing the chimps is bittersweet for Flores—but he knows it’s best for them. “It’s like sending your kids to college,” he says. “They’re going to have the closest thing to freedom.”

Anher Flores has worked at Wildlife Waystation as a caretaker for more than 30 years. The chimps seem to regard him as somewhat of a father figure. Though he warns visitors to stay back from their enclosures, he gets close, scratching bellies and handing out apple juice. “They don’t dare to grab me,” he says.

Jeff poses for the camera, lounging on the floor and glancing over his shoulder.

At LEMSIP, the chimps lived alone in these aluminum cages, which Wildlife Waystation has used only to transport the animals during emergencies. “There was no out,” says Anher Flores of the chimps’ living conditions at the lab. Flores is one of a handful of staff still caring for the sanctuary’s remaining animals.

Jeff, a former pet, is the peacemaker of his five-member group in Wildlife Waystation, mostly made up of chimps from the Laboratory for Experimental Medicine and Surgery in Primates (LEMSIP), a New York University laboratory that closed in 1997.

Magic is one of 18 chimpanzees stranded at Wildlife Waystation, a sanctuary in California that closed in 2019. The National Institutes of Health and private laboratories bred hundreds of chimps for medical research, which ended in 2015. Seven years later, more than a hundred of them still haven’t been placed in accredited sanctuaries.