A prison work crew was scything a field in the park not far from Chimp Haven's entrance gate the afternoon I arrived. One prisoner pulled back from his work as I drove up and he locked eyes with mine, a searing, deeply unsettling stare that suddenly had me wondering if there wasn't something to the rumors I'd heard that the inmates weren't pleased about their new neighbors. I'd ask Forcht Wade's assistant warden, Anthony D. Batson, about this later that afternoon, making an impromptu visit to the correctional facility after leaving Chimp Haven. Batson came to the front desk and showed me to his office, a veritable museum to the Tigers, Louisiana State University's beloved football team. He told me the prisoners were certainly aware of Chimp Haven, having access to TV and newspapers, and doing occasional work in the area, but that he hadn't heard them express any particular opinions about it. "A number of guys have asked me what would happen if one of the chimps gets out," he said. "Whether they'd have to go get it. But we both have our escape procedures. Theirs is a modern, up-to-date, first-class containment facility. They're on top of it. Of course, they tranquilize. We don't tranquilize."

At the request of Chimp Haven's president, Linda Brent, a behavioral primatologist specializing in chimpanzees, I timed my arrival at Chimp Haven for a few days before any chimps arrived, so that the retirees could get acclimated to their new environment and to one another with as few distractions from humans as possible. Brent, an expert in captive-chimpanzee management, is a slight woman in her early 40's with a Midwestern country-girl swagger. She wrote her dissertation on infant chimp development, conducting her research at Gombe National Park in Tanzania, the site of Jane Goodall's pioneering work on wild chimpanzees. For Brent, the experience of seeing chimps in the wild, "just walking by, doing whatever they want, whenever they want," as she put it, changed her life. Now, after 17 years of being what she calls "the entertainment director" for the research chimps at the Southwest Foundation in San Antonio, she could hardly contain herself when talking about Rita and Teresa's imminent arrival.

"It's been since the 1960's that they were in the wild," she said. "We don't even know where they were taken from. The records from back then aren't very good. Just the fact that you could import them -- that was done away with in the early 70's, which is why they started breeding programs for research. But I think they'll be fine. They'll be nervous at first. They aren't used to trees. That type of thing."

At the beginning of my tour of Chimp Haven, I walked out into one of the facility's two wooded areas, accessed from the chimps' bedrooms and play areas through a system of metal chutes. Each section is a five-acre wedge of woods, secured with a combination of 8-foot-deep moats (chimps, being all muscle, sink like stones) and 17-foot-high concrete walls with inset metal-barred apertures running their entire length, so that even from their pastoral remove the chimps can look back toward the hubbub of the facility's central residence. A number of Chimp Haven's incoming retirees will still be sexually active and, chimps being quite promiscuous, all the males will be vasectomized, thus allowing them to "express their normal behavioral repertoire," as Amy Fultz, Chimp Haven's primate behaviorist, put it.

Fultz worked with Brent at the Southwest Foundation in San Antonio, doing behavioral studies and devising what they call "enrichment" activities with the research chimps there. In 1995, she and Brent founded Chimp Haven, which then was dedicated primarily to gathering concerned primatologists and chimpanzee specialists to start devising a way of dealing with the country's growing number of surplus chimpanzees. The great lab-chimp surplus is, in large part, an unforeseeable consequence of AIDS. In 1986, the National Institutes of Health began an aggressive breeding program that nearly doubled the number of research chimps in the country, on the seemingly logical but ultimately incorrect assumption that our closest genetic kin would serve as ideal models for developing a vaccine. Chimps, it turns out, can contract the virus, but they are virtually immune to its effects.

Suddenly faced with the huge ethical and economic problems of what to do with so many surplus chimpanzees (each chimp costs roughly $10,000 a year to maintain), the National Research Council issued a report in 1997 advising Congress against euthanizing the chimps, calling instead for some way of properly repaying them for services rendered. With the urging of a consortium of animal-welfare organizations known as the National Chimpanzee Research Retirement Task Force, and with support from numerous laboratories and various zoological organizations, the Chimp Act passed unanimously. Chimp Haven was awarded the contract to construct and maintain the government's new chimpanzee-sanctuary system in September 2002, and when a group of local developers and the Caddo Parish Commission offered up 200 acres of parish parkland, all the pieces for constructing the flagship of that system were in place. Every aspect of Chimp Haven has been carefully considered, right down to the grief counselors for the staff for when the chimps pass away. Touring the facility's huge main kitchen, I saw refrigerator shelves lined with rows of "apesicles" -- plastic cups filled with a frozen fruit-juice suspension of raw vegetables and fruit. Against the opposite wall, alongside a popcorn maker, stood a massive container of primate biscuits -- essentially dry hunks of vitamin-and-protein-enriched kibble. Set out on a long metal food-preparation table were rows of turf boards: square sections of thick plastic covered with AstroTurf onto which staff workers were getting ready to smear a mixture of peanut butter, nuts and seeds, which the chimps must ferret out with their fingers. Insofar as the better part of a chimpanzee's day in the wild is spent foraging for food, many of these enrichment devices at Chimp Haven are geared toward alleviating the boredom of having three squares regularly served up to them.

"Everything we use here we try to evaluate on a scientific level," Fultz explained when I asked her about some of the other enrichment items I'd been shown: crayons and chalk, giant plastic toys and Nylabones (basically big dog-chews), Mighty Mouse and Woody Woodpecker videotapes and television sets, specially rigged with clear plastic coverings to protect the electronics. Chimps have very strong and immediate likes and dislikes. Observational evidence to date has revealed that chimps find nature-sound CD's soothing. Younger chimps prefer kids' movies, Disney specials, "Barney" and the like. The mature chimps' tastes, on the other hand, tend toward melodrama and anything with lots of action and aggression. Soap operas like "Passions" and "General Hospital" are big hits, the latter, it seems, because lab chimps have gotten so used to people in white coats. "The Jerry Springer Show" and N.F.L. football games are also quite popular. Golf, baseball and PBS programming (except, of course, for nature shows) are not.