After life of trauma, Liberian lab chimps settle into retirement

Floating on a river boat near a Liberian island, vet Richard Ssuna watches intently as animal carers wade towards the shore hurling fruits and imitating chimpanzee calls as they go.

The beach is empty, but the sound of rustling and chimpish grunts begins to fill the green undergrowth. Slowly, an ape knucklewalks out onto the beach to grab some food.

He's a high-ranking member of his troop, explains Ssuna, as more chimpanzees follow. The younger ones gambol and hoot in delight as carers throw them bananas, palm nuts and cassava.

Sixty-five chimps are spread across six uninhabited river islands near the Atlantic Ocean, about 55 kilometers south of the West African country's capital Monrovia. But their joy in feeding belies a dark past.

The chimps are the remainders of a group of about 400 ex-test subjects of a U.S.-funded research project and have survived decades of invasive experiments. Some of the animals underwent several hundred biopsies.

"They were traumatized," says Ssuna, who's also a director of Humane Society International (HSI), a rights group that now cares for the primates.

Chimp testing in Liberia began 1974, when the New York Blood Center (NYBC) funded biomedical research related to hepatitis B and other diseases at a complex by the Farmington River.

During Liberia's devastating 1989-2003 civil war, the chimpanzees nearly starved to death as the country imploded around them.

Research staff in the impoverished country had to dig into their own pockets to provide basic sustenance.

The researchers retired many of the chimps to the river islands in the mid-2000s but their ordeal continued.

For reasons that remain unclear, NYBC cut funding in 2015 -- in a move that provoked global...