FORT PIERCE, Fla. — It was a heartwarming moment caught on camera on the Treasure Coast. And now it's going viral.
A 29-year-old chimpanzee saw the sky and romped outside for the first time.
Her name is Vanilla and she now lives at the Save the Chimps Sanctuary in Fort Pierce.
Up until this point, she spent much of her life inside a brutal testing laboratory.
The sanctuary posted the video on YouTube.
"Where she lived in a cage that was suspended over the ground for easier cleaning," Dan Mathews, with Save the Chimps, said. "So when she arrived to us in Fort Pierce last year, she had never even felt the grass beneath her feet, much less been outside and been able to see the open sky without any obstructions."
The sanctuary is home to 12 chimpanzee families.
Like Vanilla, many of them have been rescued from labs.
Their handlers said the chimps eat more than 1,100 bananas every day and are free to roam 150 acres of land.
Meet the different chimps on the sanctuary's website.
