An elderly mountain lion who spent his life chained to the back of a truck has finally gotten a taste of freedom.

Mufasa the mountain lion was rescued from an illegal Peruvian circus earlier this year. Likely sold into the exotic pet trade as an infant, he had spent 20 years being carted around from village to village and forced to perform.

Lacking even the comfort of a cage, when he wasn’t performing he would be locked up and chained in the open bed of a truck, where he’d curl up behind the tent poles to sleep.

“It was heartbreaking to see Mufasa chained among the circus equipment, living on the back of a pickup truck,” Jan Creamer, president of Animal Defenders International (ADI), said in a statement. “A heavy harness and chains were wrapped around his body and as we cut them away, he stretched, free, for the first time.”

At the time, Creamer described the scene as “the most sad, wretched thing that you’ve ever seen,” noting that “it was like he wasn’t even alive.”

Fortunately, he was rescued by ADI’s Operation Spirit of Freedom, a yearlong crackdown on illegal circuses in the wake of Peru’s 2011 ban on performing circus animals, after an eight-hour standoff with his owners.

When he was found, the neglected mountain lion was very underweight. But the real damage was more than skin deep; rescuers described him as “quite nervous,” and said he appeared to be afraid of people.

But fortunately, help arrived. Mufasa was transferred to ADI’s Spirit of Freedom rescue center in Lima, Peru, where rescuers began to heal his body and mind. “His appetite and coat condition have improved after receiving specialist veterinary treatment,” the group said.