An orangutan named Sandra, at the center of a landmark ruling in Argentina that said she is a “non-human person” entitled to some of the same rights as humans, is making her way to a Florida sanctuary where great apes enjoy those privileges without benefit of a court order.
Once Sandra is there, the 33-year-old orangutan will have the company of others in her species for the first time in many years. Sandra left her solitary world at a zoo in Buenos Aires in late September and is currently in Kansas, where she’ll remain in quarantine until she’s cleared to join the 52 orangutans and chimpanzees living at the Center for Great Apes in Wauchula, Florida. There, Sandra will be able to lead a more social life in a facility designed with arboreal orangutans’ needs in mind.
Orangutan is a word from the Malay and Indonesian languages that means “man of the forest.” Orangutans, found in the wild only on the Indonesian islands of Sumatra and Borneo, spend most of their lives in trees. At the Center for Great Apes, Sandra will be able to travel through an intricate network of above-ground tunnels to the 11 different areas where orangutans live on the more-than 100-acre site.
For the first time in her life, Sandra “will have the opportunity to go to different habitats,” said Patti Ragan, who founded the Wauchula sanctuary a few years after developing an appreciation for the species’ quiet, gentle nature while volunteering for a rehabilitation project for wild orangutans in 1984. “It will be her choice.”
Temporarily living at the Sedgwick County Zoo in Wichita, Kansas, Sandra won’t move to Florida until she is cleared for transfer in a battery of tests for tuberculosis, hepatitis and others required by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Sandra’s arrival in Florida will be quiet and without media fanfare, said Ragan, who has received dozens of requests from news organizations wanting to film the orangutan’s arrival.
“It’s a serious thing to get her settled,” Ragan said. “It’s about Sandra.”
‘Our Obligation To Respect Them’
Her sanctuary has become a model for others caring for great apes rescued from research laboratories, pet owners and the entertainment industry. It’s the only one in the Americas accredited for orangutans, and Argentine Judge Elena Liberatori was clear Sandra “spend the rest of her life in a more dignified situation” in her 2015 order releasing Sandra from a Buenos Aires zoo that gave the ape non-human personhood.
“With that ruling I wanted to tell society something new, that animals are sentient beings and that the first right they have is our obligation to respect them,” Liberatori told The Associated Press.
Sandra’s journey to Florida began in 2014, when she was recognized by Argentine courts as a “non-human person” illegally deprived of freedom. Animal rights activists, decrying the conditions at the Buenos Aires zoo, had filed a habeas corpus petition — a document typically used to challenge the legality of a person’s detention or imprisonment.
The ruling was supposed to secure Sandra’s release from a basketball court-sized concrete cell at the 140-year-old Buenos Aires zoo, but she never was moved.
Sandra, born at a zoo in East Germany and transferred to Buenos Aires in 1995, had a baby in 1999, but it was taken from her that year and sold to an animal park in China. In the wild, orangutans cling to their mothers and travel with them for about seven years while they’re learning to forage and fend for themselves.
She was the only orangutan at the Buenos Aires zoo. Orangutans differ from other great apes in that they’re semi-solitary — adult males, in particular, are almost always loners — but females spend time together when they don’t have to compete as much for food.
In 2016, the zoo closed for good and said about 1,000 animals would be set free as it was transformed into an eco-park. But hundreds of animals, including Sandra, were still caged a year later.
Sandra’s caretakers had argued that moving her abroad or releasing her to the wild could put her life at risk and it would be better to improve her the conditions of her cage. She is a hybrid orangutan — half Sumatran and half Bornean, which are recognized as separate species — and experts worried she might not adapt well if she were moved to Indonesia.
Options were explored in Brazil, Spain and other places, but Liberatori decided in 2017 that Sandra would move to the nonprofit Center for Great Apes, a permanent sanctuary for orangutans and chimpanzees that have been rescued or retired from the entertainment industry, research or the exotic pet trade. The Wauchula sanctuary is forested, and more humid than Argentina’s capital.
“Sandra will have bigger compounds and special caregivers” once she moves to the Center for Great Apes, Federico Iglesias, director of the eco-park created after the closure of the Buenos Aires zoo, told The AP.
Great Apes Retired From Entertainment
“Completely hoked on orangutans” after her experience as a Zoo Miami volunteer working in Borneo to rehabilitate orphaned wild orangutans, Ragan established the sanctuary in the 1990s. She also nursed a 4-week-old infant orangutan held at a tourist attraction in Miami that the owner planned to sell to a circus.
Ragan thought the infant would live out its life at an accredited zoo, but learned the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, which runs breeding programs for endangered animals through species survival plans, wasn’t interested in Sumatran-Bornean hybrid orangutans, especially one that was hand-raised.
Ragan started looking around for a sanctuary for the infant. Finding none in the United States, she established her nonprofit in 1993, but it took another four years before she found an appropriate site.
She never expected the sanctuary to grow as large as it has, but since its founding, it has provided permanent homes for 41 chimpanzees and 23 orangutans.
When Ragan started the sanctuary, there was only one accredited facility for chimpanzees in the United States. Now there are nine chimpanzee sanctuaries in North America. The need for permanent, dignified homes is great with growing appreciation for the similarities of humans and the four types of great ape that has prompted their release from biomedical research facilities and circuses, along with less reliance on live great apes in entertainment.
Chimpanzees and bonobos share 99 percent similar DNA with humans. Gorillas and humans share about 98 percent of their DNA sequence, and orangutans and humans have about 97 percent similar DNA, according to published research.
One of the most famous Center for Great Apes residents is Bubbles, a chimpanzee reportedly born at a biomedical research facility and kept as a pet by the late singer Michael Jackson. When Bubbles grew too strong to be around people. Bubbles was “retired” from show business and sent to a California animal trainer’s compound, Bubbles moved to the Center for Great Apes in 2005 with a large group of other chimpanzees from the entertainment world.
One of the missions of the Ragan’s center is to spread awareness of the problems associated with the use of great apes in entertainment. Perhaps no other resident of the sanctuary more than the orangutan Popi better demonstrates the terrible lives great apes have when they’re forced to perform.
The 48-year-old orangutan was born at the Yerkes Primate Research Center in Atlanta, but was sold to circus trainer Bobby Berosini.
She starred as the girlfriend of “Clyde,” the orangutan in the Clint Eastwood movie “Any Which Way You Can,” as well as in “Going Ape” with Tony Danza and Danny DeVito.
Berosini also worked Popi into a Las Vegas floor show, where she was at the center of an animal welfare dispute that raised critical questions about mistreatment and abuse of great apes in the entertainment industry. The circus trainer, shown on secretly recorded videos hitting Popi and other orangutans in the show with a heavy metal rod, relinquished ownership of Popi in 2001.
Popi moved to the Center for Great Apes in 2012. There’s no pressure on her and the other apes to perform at the sanctuary, a membership-supported facility that isn’t open to the public, but offers two member tours a year.
The Center for Great Apes’ residents are “ambassadors for their species in the wild,” Ragan said.
“Seeing orangutans in the wild was amazing,” Ragan said of the seminal experience in Borneo that shaped what became her life’s work.
Though her preference would be for all orangutans rescued from private ownership to live in the wild, their natural habitat is too perilous a place for them, Ragan said.
Critically endangered orangutans are particularly at risk, and could become extinct within 50 years.
“Hundreds are murdered every year in the wild,” Ragan said.
And though Sandra lost her personhood status when she left Argentina, “we consider our residents like us and deserving of our respect and a place in our hearts,” Ragan said
