Wild Futures sits in a wooded valley near Looe in Cornwall. I Driving down the single-track lane on my first morning, I didn’t know what to expect. I had agreed to work there as a volunteer for two months. What I found was a place run with extraordinary care and a philosophy I keep thinking about still.

Wild Futures is home to capuchin monkeys, woolly monkeys, and spider monkeys — all primates that were once kept as captivity pets or used in the entertainment industry. The problem with keeping primates as pets is not simply that it is illegal in the UK. It is that primates are profoundly social animals who need to learn complex behaviours from other members of their species. Raised by humans, they often fail to develop normal social behaviour.

A capuchin named Coco had been kept living alone in a flat in Birmingham. His owner had dressed him in clothes and taken him everywhere. When Coco arrived at Wild Futures, he didn’t know how to interact with other monkeys. He was afraid of trees. He had never seen foraging behaviour. Watching him learn was one of the most moving things I have ever witnessed.

The staff practice what they call enrichment every day. Hiding food in paper parcels. Hanging branches at different heights. Introducing new objects. The idea is to encourage the animals to use their cognitive abilities. Primates are intelligent enough to be profoundly bored. Boredom in captivity produces stereotypic behaviours — repetitive movements that are a sign of psychological distress.

I enjoyed preparing the enrichment packages more than almost anything. There was something about knowing that an animal would have to think, explore and problem-solve to get a piece of fruit that felt fundamentally right. This is what animals are built to do.

What I learned at Wild Futures is this: rescuing an animal from a bad situation is only the beginning. To give back what the animal lost — the chance to behave normally, to be with others of its kind — that is the longer, harder, more important work.