Orangutan with human rights will move to Florida sanctuary
By Eileen AJ Connelly , New York Post, September 28, 2019
Sandra the orangutan, AP photo
An orangutan who was ruled Argentina’s “first non-human person” is moving to a sanctuary in Florida.
The 33-year-old primate named Sandra born in an East German zoo and sold to Buenos Aires Zoo in 1994. Lawyers won an appeal in 2015 arguing she was being detained illegally. The ruling by Argentine judge Elena Liberatori was in response to a complaint by an Argentine animal rights group that Sandra was living in inadequate conditions.
The zoo shut down in 2016, but Sandra remained there, alone in her concrete enclosure because setting her free in the wild would have endangered her life, because she had never lived outside of captivity and because she is a hybrid of two different types of orangutan, Sumatran and Bornean.
Sandra arrived in Kansas Thursday, the Associated Press reported. After a quarantine period, she’ll move to the Center for Great Apes near Wauchula, Florida.
The sanctuary, which has 21 orangutans and 31 chimpanzees, mainly provides a permanent home for orangutans and chimpanzees rescued or retired from the entertainment industry, research or the exotic pet trade.
It was chosen in part because it is in a more forested and humid area than Argentina’s capital, a more appropriate climate for an orangutan.
“There she will be able to spend the rest of her life in a more dignified situation,” said Liberatori, the judge, who has a large picture of Sandra hanging in her office
The center’s best-known resident is Bubbles, late singer Michael Jackson’s chimpanzee.
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