On Sunday night, the first episode of the HBO docuseries, Chimp Crazy, aired. Just as we did with Tiger King, we are looking to see how this documentary addresses a largely hidden mistreatment of animals. Of course, we are hopeful that, as with any media emphasis on the plights of animals, this is the beginning of a new momentum in our society to treat nonhuman primates with greater dignity and respect than they currently receive.
Chimpanzees, as our closest living cousins in the animal kingdom, have suffered many threats and setbacks over the past decades. Since the 1960s, we have worked to end private ownership of chimpanzees and other nonhuman primates and to improve their circumstances in zoos, laboratories and roadside exhibits. We played an especially critical role in the campaign to wind down the use of chimps in animal research and testing.
One foundational contribution on that score involves the status of chimpanzees under U.S. federal law (the U.S. was the last country to subject chimpanzees to invasive experimentation). Because of habitat loss, disease and poaching, wild chimpanzees were classified as “endangered” in 1990, which provided wild chimpanzees with the highest level of protection under U.S. law. But chimpanzees kept captive in the U.S. were only classified as "threatened," with a “special rule” that deprived them of any protection under the federal Endangered Species Act.
For years, we worked to change that—arguing that it was unlawful for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to not extend endangered status—and the protections triggered by that status—to captive members of the species and that it undermined the conservation purpose of the ESA to allow continued exploitation of the U.S. captive population (whether in laboratories, zoos or the pet trade). Such a shift in status would be a gamechanger for captive chimpanzees. Finally, in 2015, we won: The agency announced that all chimpanzees, wild and captive, were endangered. This monumental change made immense change possible for captive chimps, allowing for the use of the ESA—a powerful legal tool—to advance the welfare of individual captive chimps.
