
 
 Chimpanzee Toni is pictured on his 50th birthday in November 2011 at the Tierpark Hellabrunn zoo in Munich, southern Germany. (Sven Hoppe/AFP/Getty Images) 
 
 Wild chimpanzees have been protected under the Endangered Species Act for nearly a quarter century, but not captive chimps. Without that oversight, they have been held in pens, bought and sold for research, and poked, prodded and injected with potions to find cures that might benefit humans. 
 
 The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service changed that Friday by announcing new rules that pull captive chimpanzees under the umbrella of greater federal protection. The designation put an end to the service’s only “split listing” under the Endangered Species Act in its history, designed in 1990 to allow the National Institutes of Health to fund medical experiments using captive chimps. 
 
 [Conflicting endangered rules for wild and captive chimps are ‘inconsistent’ and ‘flawed’, officials say] 
 
 Under rules that go into effect in September, importing and exporting chimpanzees across U.S. borders, and across state borders, for biomedical research will require federal permits issued by Fish and Wildlife. When the new rules were proposed two years ago following a request by primate specialist Jane Goodall and the Humane Society of the United States, agency Director Dan Ashe called the earlier decision to list wild chimps as endangered and captive chimps as threatened, with less protection, “flawed,” and said the proposal “would correct this inconsistency.” 
 
 
 
 British primatologist Jane Goodall speaks during a news conference at National Museum of Science and Technology in Alcobendas, near Madrid, Spain, on May 28, 2015. The world’s great apes face extinction within decades, Goodall warned on July 29, 2014, in a call to arms to ensure that man’s closest relatives are not wiped out. (Javier Soriano/AFP/Getty Images) 
 
 Ashe said the new rule is a clear message that, contrary to popular belief, the survival of all chimps is threatened. More than a million have disappeared from the wild since the beginning of the 20th century, according to estimates by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources. Millions of chimps once roamed the wild, but as humans invade chimpanzee habitats to create farms and hunt the animals for meat, fewer than 300,000 remain, according to IUCN’s Red List of Threatened Species. 
 
 “Extending captive chimpanzees the protections afforded their endangered cousins in the wild will ensure humane treatment and restrict commercial activities under the Endangered Species Act,” Ashe said. “The decision responds to growing threats to the species and aligns the chimpanzee’s status with existing legal requirements. Meanwhile, we will continue to work with range states to ensure the continued survival and recovery of chimpanzees in the wild.” 
 
 [New rule: Stop testing chimps. Researchers say it’s no longer needed.] 
 
 Although the rule hurts an industry that trades chimps as exotic pets for entertainment uses circuses and movies, it hits medical research in the United States the hardest. The U.S. is the only developed nation that continues to use apes for research, at the insistence of the NIH. European nations banned the practice years ago, though they continue to use large numbers of rhesus macaques and spider monkeys for tests. 
 
 But in recent years, after numerous petitions and badgering by animal rights activists such as the Humane Society and the Jane Goodall Institute, the NIH started to change its thinking. The proposal of new rules by Fish and Wildlife in 2013 dovetailed with recent findings by the Institute of Medicine and an NIH advisory panel that use of chimps for research on human diseases was no longer necessary. 
 
 At the start of that year, the NIH’s Council of Councils, an advisory group, proposed to severely restrict medical and behavioral research on chimps and to send most research chimps into retirement. 
 
 [NIH acts to retire most chimps available for testing] 
 
 By June, the NIH decided to phase out the funding and use of nearly 400 chimps housed at facilities across the country, mostly in New Mexico and Texas. The agency said it would place all but 50 in sanctuaries, Director Francis S. Collins said at the time. The 50 would be kept for research, he said. 
 
 Animal rights activists applauded the rule. “It’s another barrier to using chimpanzees, providing momentum to our efforts to retire these animals” from research, Jonathan Lovvorn, chief counsel of the Humane Society, said in a statement. “Hopefully, this sends a strong signal to not even attempt to use these animals.” 
 
 “This will be enormously beneficial to individuals in inappropriate captive conditions,” said Jane Goodall, founder of her namesake institute and a U.N. messenger of peace. “As such it is a tremendously significant decision which will be welcomed by everyone concerned with the well-being of our closest living relatives.” 
 
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 For more, you can sign up for our weekly newsletter here, and follow us on Twitter here. ||||| The primates had previously had a ‘split status’ with those in US classified as ‘threatened’ but new rules will restrict scientific research on captive animals 
 
 The US has named chimpanzees a fully endangered species, extending greater protections to the apes in a decision that primate researcher Jane Goodall has hailed as a sign of “an awakening”. 
 
 
 
 The US Fish and Wildlife Service director, Dan Ashe, announced on Friday that chimpanzees will no longer hold their unique “split status” under US law, which since the 1990s has protected wild chimps but allowed largely unfettered research on captive animals. 
 
 Chimpanzee representatives argue for animals' rights in New York court Read more 
 
 Prompted by the worries of Aids researchers and thinking the special status would forestall the exploitation of wild chimps, the US previously classified chimps in America as “threatened”. 
 
 Ashe said: “That was a well-intentioned decision, but we now realize it was a mistake.” 
 
 Rather than solve the problem, the dual status “expanded a culture and attitude of treating these animals as commodities,” he said. 
 
 The decision to provide the full protections of the Endangered Species Act to chimpanzees follows years of research by the Fish and Wildlife Service and National Institutes of Health, as well as years of activism by the Humane Society and other animal welfare organizations. 
 
 The new rules grant new protections to the primates, restrict their commercial trade, and will probably most affect biomedical research institutions, which will now have to apply for permits in order to perform research on chimpanzees. 
 
 Absent permits, the new rule will also ban interstate commerce, and prohibit “taking”, a term that could encompass anything that could cause a chimpanzee harm or distress, from serious injury to taking blood to harassment. 
 
 The federal agency says that “permits will be issued for these activities only for scientific purposes that benefit the species in the wild, or to enhance the propagation or survival of chimpanzees.” 
 
 Researchers would need to show “substantial” contribution to chimpanzees’ survival in the wild, Ashe said, either through their scientific research or material contributions to support the animals in the wild, such as giving to habitat restoration programs. 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest Dr Jane Goodall: ‘I think of chimpanzees as chimpanzeebeings because they’re so like us.’ Photograph: Javier Soriano/AFP/Getty Images 
 
 Goodall praised the decision, saying: “There are times in the past when I wondered whether this day would ever happen. 
 
 “It shows an awakening, it shows a new consciousness. We should all raise our glasses tonight.” 
 
 Not all scientists celebrated, however, with some arguing that the rules threatened vital research that could save lives. 
 
 “This new ruling effectively means that biomedical research with the chimpanzee model may become difficult, if not impossible, to conduct,” the National Association for Biomedical Research (NABR) said in a statement, adding that the species’ contribution to medicine “benefits nearly every child born in America today”. 
 
 NABR said that chimpanzees made it possible to produce vaccines for hepatitis, and that the species could help with research in any number of diseases that humans suffer from. 
 
 “It would be unfortunate, even grave, should an infectious disease outbreak occur where human lives are at stake and a chimpanzee model could expedite development of life-saving medicines.” 
 
 But Wayne Pacelle, the president of the Humane Society of the United States, said the decision was “an incredible one-two punch for conservation and chimpanzee protection”. 
 
 While the old law “reflected some moral confusion” about chimpanzees, he said, more Americans now understood that “chimpanzees possess so many qualities that we value, the capacity to suffer, to show intelligence, awareness”. 
 
 He said the decision heralded “a new era where we treat them with respect and show concern for every individual”. 
 
 Pacelle’s view was echoed by Goodall. 
 
 “I remember so well,” she said, “how the scientific establishment told me that chimpanzees couldn’t have personalities, couldn’t have minds, couldn’t be capable of any kind of rational thought and certainly couldn’t have emotions, because those are unique to the human animal.” 
 
 Even within the past two decades “we’ve seen a lot of change,” she said. “I think of chimpanzees as chimpanzee beings because they’re so like us.” 
 
 Although many biologists and researchers remain wary of anthropomorphizing animals, and divided about how to talk about and study animal consciousness, research into intelligent and social animals has expanded massively in the past 30 years. 
 
 REsearch has found evidence that chimpanzees exhibit complex memory, emotions, self-awareness and even an awareness of death. Photograph: Juergen & Christine SohnsTier Und Naturfotografie J & C Sohns/Getty Images 
 
 The field of animal cognition has boomed alongside neuroscience, geneticists have shown that humans share most of their genes with chimpanzees, and research has shown evidence that chimps exhibit complex memory, emotions, self-awareness, and even an awareness of death. Greater research also shows quirkier similarities with mankind: 17 years of study concluded this month that some wild chimps indulge in regular, habitual drinking. 
 
 The cultural shift has extended into the public domain: though a chimpanzee once starred alongside Ronald Reagan, in May a poll found that nearly a third of Americans felt that animals deserved the same protections as humans, and this year an animal rights campaign won itself a hearing over partial, legal “personhood” for chimpanzees in New York. 
 
 That case could remove two chimpanzees from a research program at Stony Brook University in New York. 
 
 Ashe said people should not “read anything else” into the new rule except “we have learned a lot about the nature of chimpanzees”. 
 
 “Some of the things that we thought did not constitute harm or harassment of chimpanzees do in fact constitute harm and harassment,” he said, and the rule is “in large part in recognition of that”. 
 
 Goodall said she hoped the new classification would help counter the forces that threaten chimpanzees: habitat destruction by deforestation and encroaching humans, diseases, the bushmeat trade, and the “surging demand from Asia” for captive animals. 
 
 In particular, Goodall hoped the new rules would help end the practice of keeping chimps as pets or for entertainment, noting that the animals grow too powerful for their owners and suffer “psychological trauma”. 
 
 “They’re stuck between two worlds,” she said. “They’ve never learned to be a chimpanzee and they can never become a human.” 
 
 There are 1,742 chimps in the US, according to a project for the Center for the Study and Conservation of Apes at the Lincoln Park Zoo: 730 in biomedical labs, 559 in sanctuaries, 265 in accredited zoos, and the remainder with unaccredited facilities and private owners. 
 
 In 2011, the National Institute of Health found that while chimpanzees had research value in the past, medical advances “have provided alternatives to the use of chimpanzees”. Two years later, the institute said it would retire about 300 research chimpanzees; to date, only a handful of those animals have gone to sanctuaries, a process that Pacelle said he wants to see expedited.
– The US is alone in conducting medical experiments on chimps, but a move yesterday by federal officials may end the practice, reports the Washington Post. The US Fish and Wildlife Service declared that all chimps are now endangered. Previously it made a distinction between those in the wild, which have been endangered for decades, and those in captivity, which had the lesser designation of "threatened." The move doesn't explicitly end medical experiments, but it will require biomedical researchers to require permits with stringent conditions to be allowed to conduct experiments. The New York Times reports that 730 chimpanzees are currently in the custody of biomedical labs, adding that the new federal designation is the result of a petition filed by Jane Goodall and the Humane Society of the US. "There are times in the past when I wondered whether this day would ever happen," Goodall tells the Guardian. “It shows an awakening, it shows a new consciousness. We should all raise our glasses tonight.” The decision also will crimp the sale of chimpanzees as pets or for use in the entertainment business, but it's expected to hit medical research institutions the hardest. Fish and Wildlife chief Dan Ashe says the original decision to extend chimps the unusual dual designation was "well-intentioned," but it ended up expanding "a culture and attitude of treating these animals as commodities."