David GrimmMORGANTON, GEORGIA—On a chilly morning in early October, primatologist Steve Ross drives up to a chain-link gate blocking a narrow dirt road in northern Georgia.
He steps out of his car into a swath of the Blue Ridge Mountains and watches the cresting Sun illuminate low fog on the wooded hills. “When I went to Tanzania,” he says, thinking back on the first time he saw wild chimpanzees, “it was just like this.”A green sign on the gate reveals why Ross is here: “Project Chimps,” it reads. “Providing Lifelong Sanctuary to Chimpanzees Retired from Research.”The refuge is one of about a half-dozen chimp sanctuaries in North America, all designed to give the primates a more natural life than they had in labs, homes, or the.