According to a new federal rule, all chimpanzees could be placed on the endangered species list, thus protecting the animals from being hunted or used for test subjects.
Recently, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced a proposal that re-examined a decision made by the agency in 1990 to classify wild chimps as endangered and captive chimps as threatened.
As STL Today.com notes via the Washington Post, the listing was designed to help the National Institutes of Health fund medical experiments using captive chimps. According to Nature World News, nearly half of the 2,000 chimps held in captivity in the U.S. are used for research purposes.
As KTEP.org notes, scientists became interested in studying chimps in the 1920s in order to study primate psychology. That later branched out into outer space when the U.S. sent a chimpanzee, Ham, into space, leading into the sending of more chimps up into space to test out how humans might test out in outer space conditions.
"It's not hard to understand why chimpanzees would have been chosen from a scientific point of view," said John Pippin, a cardiologist who is with the nonprofit Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. "They do share 98 percent of our DNA."
However, in recent years, scientists have been moving away from the use of chimps in scientific testing, as Kathleen Conlee, the vice president of animal research issues at the Humane Society of the United States, told Nature World News.
Due to their close proximity to humans, chimps have been suffering illness, which caused death in some and post-traumatic stress disorder in others.
Adding to a dire state for chimpanzees, researchers have projected that chimpanzee populations in the wild have decreased by more than 65 percent over the last 30 years due to poaching and loss of habitat.
"The question now is being asked in a different way," says Jeffrey Kahn, a bioethicist at Johns Hopkins University. "Not, 'Is it useful to do research involving chimpanzees?' But [rather] 'is it necessary?' "
With the latest proposal, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service director Daniel M. Ashe hopes that a remedy can be found to the problem.
Noting that "the chimpanzee is said to share 98 percent of our genes," Ashe is expecting that the restrictions on chimpanzees can help salvage the populace.
"It is in our nature to protect and conserve this iconic species, and this proposal will help," he wrote in his blog post recently.