My dear friend Annette Pienaar accompanied me to Wild Rescue Wildlife Sanctuary The seeds for the establishment of Wild Rescue were sown when the founder, Gill Simpson, visited the Barrydale baboon rehabilitation facility before it was tragically closed in 2012.
In 2013 she became volunteer manager at the Jane Goodall Institute’s Chimp Eden outside Nelspruit in Mpumalanga. On returning to Cape Town in 2014, she visited Karin Saks in the Crags, who had been forced to close her primate rehabilitation centre.
There was now no primate sanctuary in the Western Cape, and she decided that she should open one. After talking to a number of conservancies she discovered that there was a need for a rescue facility for all wild animals, not just primates.