Dear Readers,
 |
Their canines are said to be
bigger than a Lion's |
Cape Town takes the
Booby Prize for the way it has been dealing with the Baboon problem in what is South Africa’s premier tourist Mecca.
Would
you buy a property for millions that has a beautiful sea view but where you
can’t leave a single door or window open
in the height of summer without the danger of baboons coming in and emptying
your fridge and deep freeze and generally trashing and defecating all over your
home?
Would
you buy a home where you can’t plant what you want in your own garden
particularly fruit and vegetables because they act like a magnet for troops of
baboons that have amazing memories for where food can be had? The result:
repeated raids to the same property.
Would
you buy a house where all your pets like dogs, cats etc have to be kept indoors
at all times in case they are torn apart by a marauding baboon?
When
you have the world to choose from for your holiday would you rent an expensive
house for you and your family in a very scenic location that has the scary
possibility that it will be overrun by a troop of baboons because the City of Cape Town is putting the
welfare of baboons before people?
In the rest of this post my
comments will be in red.
A
couple of weeks ago The Sunday Times carried an article headed “Baboons
discover foodie haven in Constantia” a very upmarket part of the City. The
story began about how guests at the luxury Ihhaya Safari Lodge found three
baboons in their room rummaging through their suitcase after a long overseas
flight. They even squeezed out the toothpaste so you can imagine the mess. Down
the road Paul Baise found that it was impossible to prevent them from pulling
out the thatch on his roof.
The worst scenario of all is that in
some areas of Cape Town
you have to be particularly careful with your baby. The way things are going
there is every possibility that a baboon might disappear into the mountains
carrying somebody’s crying child. Baboons are like us they are certainly not
just vegetarians and are partial to flesh now and again.
 |
These are the animals you can have in
your house in Cape Town thanks to
the City Council's slack baboon management |
Our
estate near Kommetjie, which is not far from the centre of Cape Town, has been over run recently with
baboons that have evidently been breeding like rabbits because a high percentage
of them are babies. The males with the troop can be seen bonking the females all
over the place. If you are worried about your young children being corrupted by
this don’t come to Cape Town.
About
10 years ago baboons from mountainous areas rampaged through residential parts
of Cape Town, threatening people,
damaging houses, badly injuring pets like dogs and destroying anything edible
in people’s gardens.
People
were prisoners in their own homes until the monitors, employed to keep them out
of the urban areas were armed with paintball guns – not to shoot them, but just
to scare them away. This worked very effectively and where I live the situation
went from having baboons all over our houses and gardens on a regular basis to
virtually none at all.
Then goody goods at the Cape of Good Hope SPCA, who appear
to have great difficulty defining exactly what cruelty is, decided that these
paintball guns that they originally sanctioned were actually cruel. Without paintball guns to scare the baboons
away the work of the monitors, who are employed by a private company contracted
to the City Council, was made totally ineffective. These primates would just give
them the two fingers and carry on raiding homes and gardens just as they used
to do.
Two years ago when I last wrote a post about this Belinda
Abraham, the Communications Manager of the Cape of Good Hope SPSA “clarified”
the position by saying that the SPCA has not “banned or prohibited the use of
paintball guns” but had merely withdrawn their endorsement of their use.
To show how mixed up the SPCA is about the use of these
guns she added: “A method that was reviewed and supported previously may no
longer be relevant, appropriate or humane now. The SPCA will not support
methods that are considered inhumane and cruel or that have insufficient
supporting information.”
The Council then stopped their monitors using them, only to
let them go back to the paintball method when the baboon menace became
impossible to control any other way.
Earlier this month I sent the following email to Cape Town’s Mayor Geordin
Hill-Lewis:
“The baboon situation in our
estate of Imhoff’s Gift near Kommetjie is once again getting completely out of
hand with whole troops all over the place. If you have a small dog, as I do,
you have to leave it in the house when you go out in case it gets taken out by
a baboon. Apart from the fact that if you grow anything like vegetables or
fruit the baboons will trash them. For some years the problem was kept to a
reasonable level but it now appears to have got out of hand once again. Are there far less monitors now?
Something
drastic needs to be done urgently. We can’t be expected to be prisoners in our
own homes. DO BABOONS PAY RATES?”
She finished her email by tell
me that effectively keeping baboons out of our homes was not the Council’s
problem IT WAS OURS.
“A
final note is that private house security is up to the individual resident /
landowner. Our service provider, NCC (071 5886540) can assist to advise
you on this. The installation of a strategic baboon fence is really the only
long term solution and I encourage you to work with your community to assist us
with solutions.” The estate I am in is surrounded by a fence which is electrified at the
top and I have seen a big male baboon walk up to it and casually climb over it
without any sign of being shocked. So what kind of expense would individual
home owners have to go to ensure that a
fence around their property is completely baboon proof?
The Sunday Times told us that the Constantia
baboon troop dubbed CT2 had made a tactical blunder because they are scheduled
to be removed under a draft management plan that was tabled at a public meeting
in the area. In her email to me Julia Wood did not mention that
there was any possibility of us residents in Imhoff’s Gift being given the same
kind of protection. How odd is that. Is it only for the rich?
Regards,
Jon, a Consumer Watchdog who
believes baboons should either be in the zoo or well up in the mountains and
nowhere near where people live. Those baboon huggers who say the baboons were
here first should just remember that the original indigenous people of the Cape were the Khoi. So are they all Khoi or too coy to
admit it?
Jon, a Consumer Watchdog who get's things done even if he has to snarl occasionally.
