Chester & Festus

My name is Chester. I’m about 29 years old, and I live here with my companion, Festus.

We came here from another sanctuary that had to close, but our story started long before we arrived.

We were found in the garden of a house, tied together by our necks. People believe we had been kept there for more than 20 years, used for tourist photos.

Twenty years is a very long time.

We don’t know what those years were like for everyone who saw us. But we know what they left behind.

Festus has no teeth. They were probably pulled out so he couldn’t bite. After being handled and mistreated for so many years, we learned not to trust people. We developed behaviors that aren’t normal for wild monkeys, and sometimes we can be aggressive when people come too close.

So the people who care for us keep their distance. Staff and volunteers don’t come into our enclosure, and they don’t try to touch us.

And honestly, that’s okay.

For most of our lives, people decided what happened to us. Now, the people here respect our space.

We were never given the chance to learn how to be wild monkeys. We don’t know how to find everything we would need in the forest or how to survive there on our own. After spending our entire lives in captivity, we simply cannot be released.

But that doesn’t mean we don’t deserve a good life.

Here, we have space. We have safety. We have each other.

Most importantly, no one is using us anymore.

We can’t go back and change the first 20 years of our lives. We can’t undo what happened to us or become the wild monkeys we might once have been.

But we can finally live without being afraid of what the next person might do.

After a lifetime of being treated like someone else’s property, this is the first place that truly feels like ours.