The Grumpy Vegan did not know well Dr. Carole C. Noon but nonetheless is saddened to learn of her passing.
Dr. Carole C. Noon, a primatologist whose passion — and compassion — for her subjects led to her founding of Save the Chimps, the organization that provides the world’s largest sanctuary for captive chimpanzees, died Saturday in Fort Pierce, Fla. She was 59 and lived on the sanctuary grounds in Fort Pierce.
Save the Chimps, a privately financed nonprofit organization with an annual budget of about $4 million, currently cares for 282 chimpanzees, providing a kind of retirement home for chimps who were rescued from biomedical research or the entertainment business or who had been sold and raised as pets. Founded in 1997, it has two locations, the primary one the 150-acre tract, a former orange grove in Fort Pierce, just inland from the Atlantic, where 148 animals, divided among a series of three-acre islands separated by artificial waterways, can roam freely, cared for and fed by a staff of 46.
