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Founder’s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries.
For more than three decades, Willie Tucker has helped care for Sierra Leone’s western chimpanzees and watched the pressures on them change, reports contributor Patricia Sia Ngevao for Mongabay.
Tucker, widely known as “Pa Willie,” helped establish Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary in 1995. Since then, the sanctuary has rescued and cared for hundreds of chimpanzees, many confiscated from the illegal pet trade. It now houses more than 120 critically endangered western chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes verus), indicating that trafficking remains a serious problem.
Tacugama’s work also shows why wildlife protection cannot be separated from local livelihoods.
