Jeremy and Amy--The Extraordinary True Story of One Man and His Orang-Utan

Jeremy Keeling first met Amy, an abandoned orang-utan, when he was looking after the private menagerie of music impresario Gordon Mills. Amy had been born to an orang-utan with no maternal instincts and Jeremy, feeling a connection with the rejected primate, hand-reared her. A friendship was forged that would become the defining relationship of both their lives. One day in 1984, when Jeremy was driving along with one-year-old Amy sitting beside him in the passenger seat, he fell asleep at the wheel and caused a horrific car crash. The first policeman on the scene crawled into the wreckage where he was staggered to see a hairy, non-human hand cradling Jeremy's head amid the glass and twisted metal: having been saved by Jeremy, Amy now refused to let him go. For Jeremy, it was to be a long convalescence, but he and Amy joined forces with Jim Cronin, a tough-talking primate-lover from the Bronx, who shared his vision of creating a sanctuary for abused and abandoned monkeys. Pooling their knowledge, passion and meagre resources, the two men took on a derelict pig farm in Dorset and, over the next twenty years, slowly transformed it into a 65-acre, cage-less sanctuary for beleaguered primates, rescued from poachers, photographers and scientists on daring raids. Monkey World is now internationally famous and attracts some 800,000 visitors a year. This is a high-wire adventure story of grit and determination, and of love, hope and 88 Capuchin monkeys in the back of a Hercules transport plane, but most of all, at its heart, it is an inspiring tale of the life-changing bond between one man and his ape. Jeremy Keeling first met Amy, an abandoned orang-utan, in the 1960s and a friendship was formed that would become the defining relationship of both their lives. Jeremy went on to create Monkey World in Dorset, a sanctuary for beleaguered primates, rescued from poachers and scientists on daring raids all over the world. Keeling relates his friendship with Amy, an abandoned orangutan who he first met in the 1960s, when she belonged to music impressario Gordon Mills. Amy later saved Keeling's life from a car crash, and he went on to co-found Monkey World in Dorset, which has 800,000 visitors a year. Full of high wire adventure, grit, determination and a life-changing friendship between man and ape