CHICAGO – A Chicago zoo is mounting a campaign to stop a company from airing a Super Bowl Sunday commercial featuring mischievous suit-and-tie wearing chimpanzees playing tricks on their human co-worker.

Lincoln Park Zoo officials fear images of the frolicking chimps do little to help conservation efforts, inaccurately portraying them as unthreatened and even as cuddly and harmless pets.

“If people see them that way, they are less likely to try and conserve them,” Steve Ross, assistant director of the zoo’s Fisher Center for the Study and Conservation of Apes, said of the ad that shows chimps laughing at a “Kick Me” sign on the human. “Individual chimps are being harmed and wild populations are being harmed by this frivolous use of an endangered species.”

Ross said he and other animal welfare advocates have been complaining to CareerBuilder.com ever since the company started using chimps in Super Bowl commercials in 2005. But this year is different because he’s armed with a Duke University study that he says supports his longtime claims: Commercialized chimps dressed as people make viewers less concerned about the plight of wild chimps.

“The argument they (CareerBuilder.com) make is it doesn’t matter how they’re portrayed, they are helping to protect them,” said Brian Hare, an assistant professor of evolutionary anthropology who led the study. “The opposite is true. These commercials are negatively affecting people’s decisions about how they support conservation.”

CareerBuilder.com declined to comment on the study or any suggestion that the commercials put wild chimpanzees in danger.

But in a prepared statement, the Chicago-based company said the “chimpanzee stars” were not harmed and that the American Humane Society watched the commercial being filmed to ensure the animals were “treated with respect.”