Hi, everyone, and welcome to the birthday edition of our daily blog! Today, we celebrated Missy’s 47th birthday. She adores all things tomato, so of course we had to have tomatoes at every turn for her birthday party. Missy is a special chimp who is more acrobatic than any human I know- seriously, she will sprint across Young’s Hill in no time. It is very impressive. She often spends time in play sessions with her BFF Annie (there might be a few extra precious clips of this on today’s blog:) ) and she is witty, loyal to her friends, and often too cool for her human caregivers.
Missy’s journey to sanctuary has been a special one. Back in 2014, Diana wrote a blog post about Missy and how she almost didn’t make it to CSNW. Diana said it best, so I have copied some of that blog here:
“About a month before the chimpanzees left Buckshire in Pennsylvania (the private facility that owned them and leased them to different laboratories for decades), all of the chimps had health check-ups. During these check-ups, the veterinarian discovered that Foxie and Missy had uterine tumors.
Buckshire quickly arranged for both of them to have hysterectomies. The surgeries went fine, but when they were transporting Missy back to Buckshire, she crashed. She was brought back to the veterinarian under manual ventilation and had a very weak pulse. From what we were told, they “worked on her for 10 minutes and brought her back.”
We didn’t find out about this until later, and it came as a shock to know that she was so close to not having her chance to enjoy a sanctuary home. It remains a reminder to me that each moment of sanctuary, each moment of life, is invaluable.”
We are grateful every day for Missy, her group of 7, and the newly integrated group of 9. Every moment spent with them or in their presence is unique and priceless.
Happy, happy birthday to you, Missy!!!!
Cy’s group also got to celebrate and that video will be coming tomorrow (thanks, Kelsi!). 🙂
One more note- there is still time to register for the Chimpanzees in Need virtual update meeting on Friday, August 26th at 4pm PT! We are so close to safely re-homing all of the Wildlife Waystation chimps and this will be a short online Zoom meeting where NAPSA will share updates on construction of new homes, transportation efforts, and where we are with raising the funds to complete the campaign this year. There will also be an update from us, CSNW, on how the 9 are doing! Be sure to register now and tune in for the update.
Now, some photos of Missy throughout the day:
One of our favorite party decorations:
Burrito enjoying the forage:
Negra, enjoying her loot from the forage in the comfort of the green house:
Jamie watching everyone participate in the forage:
Thank you to everyone who donated party items for today!!
