Heroic viewers, welcome to Animal World: Our Co-Inhabitants.
Each year thousands of primates are taken from the wild and sold on the black market, including many that are mere infants when snatched from their others’ arms.

After capture, instead of being given love and warmth the babies receive an inanimate object to comfort them.
Many grow up psychologically scarred, with self-mutilation and repetitive movements as signs of their disturbed mental state.

Today on Stop Animal Cruelty we will visit the Center for Rescue and Rehabilitation of Primates in Peñaflor, some 40 kilometers from Chile’s capital city Santiago.

The Center is a caring home for abused, tortured, abandoned and seriously injured primates kidnapped from their natural habitats for sale in the appalling worldwide primate trade.  First, the Center’s founder and director Ms. Elba Muñoz Lopez discusses the origins of this compassionate place.

Elba(f):The Center began in 1994 with the arrival of a pot-bellied monkey that a person was selling and arrived at my house. I always say that this monkey came to my house and into our hearts because they changed our life. We realized that it was very different from having a dog, a cat, with all due respect to dogs and cats, and they were animals that were largely unprotected because they were so special. And that motivated us to take care of them and start to rescue them and learn about the subject.