A few days ago, North American NGOs ran stories emphasizing the victory that means the fact that the country’s official authorities recognized that captive chimps are in the same endangered status that the ones in the wild life, who are, in reality, being extinct.

As long as we analyze this situation more objectively, and, for the last 15 years, we have seen how the organs of the US government are gaining time to continue using chimpanzees in medical torture and entertainment programs – making public announces that in practice do not happen -,  we believe that “this victory” is more a marketing effect of news, to keep everything as it is.

When National Institute of Health (NIH) announced in 2013 that it would be retiring all chimpanzees under its control, whose maintenance is financed by the institute, the world thought that a great victory had been achieved.

But the truth is that few of them were sent to the official Sanctuary, Chimp Haven, in Louisiana, and the rest stayed where they were, with the possibility of, at any time, be assigned to medical torture, to face any new disease that affects humans.

NIH announcement was false in the sense that there was no efforts to start to expand the capability of the national sanctuary to receive hundreds of retirees, making the announcement baseless. When it was asked by NGOs, the institute came with the speech that a congressional authorization was necessary to adequate the sanctuary for retired chimpanzees in their possession. And it is still paying the torture centers worth about $ 56 a day for the maintenance of the retirees, which is a nice deal for those who keep hundreds of caged chimpanzees. The news now comes from FWS – US Fish and Wildlife Service, which is a sector of the US Department of Agriculture that takes care of the animals and their welfare.

Until days ago, captive chimpanzees were qualified as Threatened and their peers in the wild in Africa were classified as Endangered. Now all of them are considered to be “Endangered”.

The United States is the most powerful country on the planet, but it is the last, almost tied with China, to give real protection to the Great Apes and animals in general, which are subjected to all sorts of mistreatment, marketing and exploitation, due to the absence of any effective laws to protect them.

There are more than 1,000 chimpanzees in the United States – in official and private hands – with no future or destiny. Steven Wise and his fellow lawyers desperately try, at all levels of the country’s Justice, to recognize the Legal Personality of the Primates, so they are not considered as things; so far, they have succeeded.

About the announcement that the Government now boasts as a big change, we expect it is not another lie for the good faith of those who sincerely struggle to save the lives of hundreds of innocent people, who may die before gaining freedom and step on the grass that their dungeons deny them to do.

Dr. Pedro A. Ynterian

President, GAP Project International

For the full article announcement of the US Fish and Wildlife Service:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/13/science/chimpanzees-endangered-fish-and-wildlife-service.html?_r = 2