IDA Blog

Archive for the ‘IDA Africa’ Category

Grady, a Mastiff mix, spent months in the Winona Animal Shelter, in Winona, Mississippi, a prisoner of a five-run outdoor facility, with one barrel in each run and constantly running water, leaving him and the rest of his kennel mates always cold and wet—a purgatory for captive dogs. He had mange, a bacterial infection, and was undernourished. Doll Stanley had seen the miserable dog on a number of occasions, but there was no room for him at the Project Hope sanctuary, and she had to stay focused on getting the mothers and puppies out so the puppies wouldn’t die. And, finally, the day came when she was able to take Grady, and then immediately boarded him at Veterinary Associates in Grenada, where the staff fell in love with him and revivified his physical state and spirit to the point where he was able to go the sanctuary. “Rescue takes time. Unlike ‘Animal Planet,’ there are months of rehab, expenses, and the search for a home worthy of them.”

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It is with rapt fascination that a photograph of a deceased chimpanzee being visibly mourned by dozens of chimpanzees looking on as the body is being wheeled for burial has transfixed viewers across the Internet, on television, and in countless publications, with its soul-piercing sadness. The image of the matriarch Dorothy, lying still amid orphaned chimpanzees at Sanaga-Yong Chimpanzee Rescue Center, in Cameroon, Africa, is something wondrous to behold. The Sanaga-Yong Center, which provides sanctuary for nearly 70 orphans, victims of the illegal bushmeat trade, is a project of IDA Africa, the creation of In Defense of Animals’ Dr. Sheri Speede. who first traveled to the country to volunteer her veterinary skills. She made friends with three chimpanzees, Becky, Jacky, and Pepe—who had suffered decades in small cages at a resort hotel and, in 1999, became the first adult chimpanzees who had been rescued in Cameroon. In 2000, IDA Africa organized a forced confiscation of adult chimpanzees Dorothy and Nama, and eight monkeys, the first armed confiscation of illegally held primates in Cameroon.

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