All chimpanzees are now considered endangered

On Friday, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service announced that all chimpanzees will now be considered endangered, The New York Times reports.

Previously, there existed a distinction in the treatment of captive chimps, which were listed as "threatened," whereas wild chimps have been labeled "endangered" for decades. This discrepancy misled the public, falsely implying that the primates were not in "dire need" of help, said Dan Ashe, director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. In the '90s, about a million chimpanzees existed in the wild, but that number has dwindled to somewhere between 172,000 and 300,000, according to the Jane Goodall Institute.

"At the time we thought it was important to encourage breeding of captive chimps to expand their numbers," Ashe said. "But we expanded a culture of treating these animals as a commodity for research, sale, import and export, and entertainment. That has undermined the conservation of chimpanzees in the wild."

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Under the new distinctions, chimps in captivity will receive the same protections as their wild counterparts, which will create barriers to biomedical research. Any study that could harm the chimp will require a permit, as will interstate trade, and the import and export of any captive chimpanzee.