The chimpanzees at Chimfunshi live in large, enclosed, open forested area within the natural Miombo woodland – each of an area up to 80Ha (200 acres).

Each enclosure includes an indoor handling facility with several areas, which are used for supplementary feeding of the chimpanzees; for social integration, health observations and for urgent medical care if required.

The majority of Chimfunshi’s chimpanzees spend most of their time outside in the forest and sleep in ‘nests’ in the trees as they would in the wild. They are generally only in the indoor handling facilities for approximately 90 minutes of their day to ensure their health and wellbeing.
The current group sizes within each enclosure at Chimfunshi are at capacity and new additions into current groups are not possible . This means that there is no space for new rescues within any of the existing groups currently.

The largest chimpanzee group with 59 individuals live in Enclosure 2. (In the other five enclosures group numbers vary between 10 and 25 individuals).

An additional handling facility is urgently needed for Enclosure 2 as the current building is not adequate for the group size.

In addition, the construction of two further outdoor enclosures are planned, and these will also require indoor handling facilities.

The Solution

We need to construct three new handling facilities to cater for the issues raised above.

The objectives are:

• to ensure equal feeding of each chimpanzee within the group
• to be able to observe all individuals within the group regularly and be able to identify potential concerns quickly