The quebec countryside is an unlikely place to find a bunch of apes, but there’s a special group of them who have inhabited the area for more than a decade. They’re the denizens of Fauna Sanctuary — described by author Andrew Westoll as a 100-hectare retirement home for traumatized chimpanzees. Located southeast of Montreal, the facility houses thirteen survivors of biomedical testing, who owe their lives to the efforts of Gloria Grow and Richard Allan, a pair of Canadian animal rights activists who rescued them from American laboratories in the late 1990s.

A few years ago, Westoll, a former primatologist, went to live with Grow and her charges — an experience that transformed him and produced this generous and deeply affecting book. The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary is many things: a tribute to an often-misunderstood creature; a study of a gutsy woman determined to protect the species; and a keen inquiry into man’s ambivalent relationship with his nearest relative in the animal kingdom.

Westoll became enamoured of Fauna’s chimps, who include a neurotic female named Rachel and a surprisingly exuberant male named Binky. The most haunting figure in this drama, however, is Tom: caught in the wilds of central Africa at the age of three, this magnificent animal spent more than thirty years as a test subject for the beauty and biomedical industries, during which time he endured nearly 400 exploratory surgeries and was injected with strains of HIV. Though noticeably damaged, Tom conducts himself like Fauna’s elder statesman, and it’s not long before he starts to occupy Westoll’s dreams, like some spiritual messenger. For Westoll, Tom and the rest of the Fauna family provide humbling reminders of the incredible emotional range of chimpanzees — from their sadistic rages to their gentle inquisitiveness to their disarming compassion.

Their backstory, on the other hand, underlines humanity’s often cruel self-interest. A book such as this could easily be an exercise in finger wagging, but Westoll largely resists the urge. Those who have exploited these creatures are not total villains — many are animal lovers who were seduced by the promise of scientific enlightenment. Grow is similarly conflicted; for all her good intentions, she knows Fauna Sanctuary is also a prison of sorts. Her advocacy on behalf of chimpanzees is tireless. In Washington, DC, she and other activists brief a congressional committee on the Great Ape Protection Act, which strives to eliminate the use of chimps in invasive research. Relating Tom’s harrowing experiences, Grow mesmerizes the room — but what brings the group to tears is video evidence of the great chimp’s resilience. Through Westoll’s narrative, Grow emerges not as a hero, but as a do-gooder striving to do better.