Karen E. Lange

Black Beauty Ranch’s most famous unofficial resident lurks out of sight in the mud at the bottom of a horse pasture pond. He weighs perhaps 150 pounds, with a spiked shell like a plated dinosaur’s and a massive jaw. To catch food, he lies in wait, opening his mouth wide to reveal a worm-like protuberance on the tip of his tongue. When a fish swims in to get the “worm,” his jaw snaps shut.

Farm animal care manager Ashley Orr and her team did all they could to save Maggie. They trained her to come at the sound of a baby rattle to eat a pan of grain and diced fruit, so she’d stay still for medical treatments. Every two weeks over the course of seven months, they did 14 days of treatments—baths to clean her skin followed by painstaking applications of chemotherapy cream to eat away the cancer cells layer by layer.

When a snake bit Lolo, one of 62 chimpanzees Humane Society International cares for in Liberia, sanctuary director and veterinarian Richard Ssuna gave him antibiotics and pain medicine hidden in rice balls. Lolo lives on one of six mangrove islands where animals were retired from research starting in the early 2000s. When caregivers bring food by boat, they disembark and wade closer to shore. To protect both the animals’ and humans’ well-being, they don’t come into direct contact with the chimps.