The sun begins to project its rays through the clouds of autumn, the moon hides after presiding all night, illuminating the darkness that allows chimpanzees move without many restrictions. A cry of Peter waking unties a response from other enclosures. Each one has its own DNA and with time you can identify the sound emitted by each chimpanzee, all have their hallmark.

Dolores (Dora, for friends) is, approximately, 20 years old and comes out of the deck that surrounds the floor of the second floor of her house and goes in the basket. Her mind is full of ghosts and terrible memories and commands her movements. Her figure is backlit from the sun rising and the moon hiding. Her movements, slow and almost rhythmic, foreshadow an extra day in the normal life that has been stolen.

Dolores had two stages in her life. At first, as a teenager, when she lived in Di Napoli Circus and was legally confiscated by an action of NGO AILA – International Alliance of Animals, which handed her, her friend Nino and two bears to us. The trucks of the circus invaded the sanctuary , which was still in its infancy and perhaps was not prepared to face that struggle against the economic power of animal exploitation.

On the first morning I walked into her room and she gave me her first gift: one bite at a hand, without further consequences. Dolores began to enjoy her freedom in a room just for her without cage to imprison her. That chimera lasted a week. The fight was beginning, we did not know what people were capable of. A court injunction, of dubious origin, ordered her to return to the circus. We cried when she returned to her iron cage, with Nino and the two bears.

Neither the NGO nor we gave up. The circus had gone away, but we always knew where it was and further legal action was triggered. When they were on the verge of losing the animals again, found an accomplice: Beto Carrero Zoo , in Santa Catarina (south of Brazil), which hid her alone, for nearly two years, in a tiny island, where we found her. Dolores was sick, thin, it was difficult to stay healthy in that hostile, cold and wet weather, and her health mind was gone forever and the ghosts invaded it, where men were monsters that chased her everywhere.

In the Sanctuary, we put her together with the group of teens led by Guga and Noel, and she was adapting, despite unexpected crises, when the ghosts of the past returned with her memories . Neither her younger sister, Samantha, would understand. Neither her mother, Ditty , who was a short distance from her enclosure, could help her because she had been snatched from her arms a few hours after birth, as was the nefarious practice at that time.

That morning, Dolores began to move rhythmically and to clap her hands in the15feet tall basket she enjoys to stay. One hundred meters away , her three nieces , daughters of her sister Samantha – who have airy mind, since they did not know what is the suffering of slavery -, hang on the basket , making jokes while the sunlight cuts her figures and the moon which hides marks all their contours.

It is the dawn in the Great Ape Sanctuary of Sorocaba, a happy ending for some and not so happy for others, who can never leave behind the bad memories of what humans had practiced against them for a long time.
Dr. Pedro A. Ynterian
President , GAP Project International

Images of Dolores in the early morning of Sorocaba Sanctuary: