CAPE TOWN IS AGAIN MONKEYING AROUND WITH THE BABOON MENACE THAT IS ENDANGERING TOURISM AND DESTROYING PROPERTY VALUES

 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?”

          This is the reply I got was from Julia Wood, a manager in the Council’s Environmental Management Department. “I agree with you that the current tender is less effective than previously. So it’s not surprising that the baboon menace it getting back to what to it was This is due to the tools utilised to keep baboons out of the urban area such as paintball-markers and bear bangers being less effective over time due to the presence of raiding males (previously habitual raiding males were euthanatized), No wonder there are now babies all over the place with males making more by humping females for all to see. By letting things slide the Council is just making a bigger and bigger problem for the future reduced ratio of rangers to baboons (most baboon troops have grown), How stupid is that for the Council to reduce the number of rangers when it knows the baboon numbers have increased habituation to use of aversive methods, and reduction in use of these aversion tools due to welfare concerns.” of the baboons not us humans who pay the rates that keep the Council in existence.

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?

 

 

 

THE SPCA IS ENDANGERING THE JOBS OF 50 PEOPLE BY MONKEYING AROUND WITH BABOON MATTERS

 Dear Baboon Lovers,

            About 10 years ago baboons from mountainous areas rampaged through residential parts of the City 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 near Kommetjie the situation went from having baboons all over our houses and gardens on a regular basis to virtually none at all. My wife even had the pleasure of twice having a big male beside her in our kitchen. Their canines are longer than a lion’s so she could have been badly mauled.

          Now the goody goods at the Cape of Good Hope SPCA, who appear to have great difficulty defining exactly what cruelty is, have decided that these paintball guns that they originally sanctioned are actually cruel. This has made the work of the monitors, who are employed by a private company contracted to the City Council, totally ineffective. Without the paintball guns to scare these primates they just give the monitors the two fingers and carry on raiding homes and gardens just as they used to do.

          A spokesperson told me that unfortunately the City had no choice but to comply with this decision, as the National Council for the Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, being the oversight authority for animal welfare, had withdrawn its support for the use of paintball guns on baboons, declaring this method “cruel to animals.”

           Helpfully 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.”

          How many other inhumane methods of controlling animals has the SPCA supported or ignored for years before backtracking?

          The SPCA believes “there may be alternative methods” of dealing with the baboons that “can be used to achieve the same outcome, which have not been explored.” But as it does not disclose what these might be the inference is that if they do exist the SPCA has no idea what they are.

          However Ald. Marion Nieuwoudt Cape Town’s Mayoral Committee Member for the Environment told me that as there was no effective alternative to the use of paintball guns they might have to withdraw the baboon monitors. “This will have an impact on the properties and lifestyle of residents living in areas close to baboons’ natural habitat as we anticipate that baboons will frequent these areas more often,” she said.

          Will this mean that some 50 or more people will be added to the already huge number of unemployed in our country?  People’s Lives Matter more than baboons but not in Cape Town evidently.

          The various parties will hopefully meet soon to sort out this mess that is entirely due to the SPCA’s incompetence.

          The mixed up thinking at the SPCA is not doing the baboons any favours either. Their numbers have increased from 350 in 2009 to 430 in 2021, but the way things are going they could soon be on the decline.

Jenni Trethoven, founder of the Baboon Matters Trust revealed on the Trust’s blog that when the Covid lock down began in March last year she was optimistic that there would be a radical decrees in baboon activity in urban areas, but the reverse happened.

No doubt because the baboon monitors were not working at all during lockdown or at a much lower level and baboon troops had not yet heard of the Virus.

Baboons, she wrote, have been visiting the village of Kommetjie where she lives almost every day since then and “sadly incidents of shooting at baboons with pellet guns, shotguns and paintball guns increased as did the number of dog attacks on baboons.”

Dogs attack baboons at their peril. Male baboons have ripped even the most ferocious ones apart causing thousands of rand in vet bills for the owners of those that survived.

In May a baboon belonging to the Simonstown troop was shot dead by a pellet gun and that was believed to be as a result of the withdrawal of the monitors. 

So the evidence is abundantly clear that what the SPCA is doing by classifying paintball guns in this case as cruel is having an affect that is the opposite of what the Society stands for. And is it going to compensate residents for any damage done by the bad behaviour of baboons?

In the short time since the monitors have been rendered ineffective a dog on our estate near Kommetjie has been badly mauled by baboons resulting in a heavy vet bill for the own. How many more times will this sort of thing have to happen before the monitors are once more empowered to do their job effectively?

Regards,

Jon, a lover of baboons that know their place – in the wild not in our garden or our house.

P.S. Baboon lovers expect people like me and my wife to have desert gardens so there is nothing like vegetables, fruit trees or anything else that might attract them, bearing in mind that they eat just about everything and seldom come in just ones and twos. Bird feeders are also out because they eat seed as well and they will rip apart anything it might be in. Our little dog would have to be kept inside at all times especially when we are not at home and every opening window would have to have bars on it. Our house would also have to have reinforced gutters that don’t collapse when baboons swing on them. If the SPCA has its way this is what it will be like for a lot of us living in the City of Good Hope? We’ve had some experience of this before the advent of paintball guns and WE CERTAINLY DON’T WANT IT REPEATED.

P.P.S. Ironically while this baboon business was going on the City has been updating its animal-keeping bylaws to ensure that pets like dogs, cats etc are not a source of danger or a nuisance.