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MONA has been asked by CITES in Madrid to rescue and re-home AFRICA, a 10 year old female chimpanzee being held illegally at a private house in Gran Canaria.

She was taken from the wild only 10 years ago and smuggled to Gran Canaria where her current owners bought her at the harbour. It is likely that her entire family would have been killed during her capture.

Apes in Entertainment - The Facts

• Chimpanzees are specifically bred for the entertainment industry.
• In the wild baby chimpanzees stay with their mothers until they are seven years of age. In the entertainment industry captive bred chimp babies are removed at birth in order to start their ‘humanization’ and ‘training’.
• Chimpanzees are not natural performers. Standing, walking upright in shoes, sitting in chairs and the other activites required are actions these animals are forced to learn.
• The familiar "No animals were harmed during the making of this film" may indeed be true but this proviso does not cover pre-production or off-site ‘training’ when there is the greatest potential for abuse.
• A chimpanzee's 'acting career' is comparitively short as adolescents become too difficult to handle so they are discarded to be replaced by a new younger animal
• Chimpanzees are critically endangered so portraying these animals as objects of ridicule in advertisements, circuses and films detracts from the serious conservation issues surrounding these sensitive intelligent animals.