Walking with Baboons

With Baboon Matters - Cape Town, South Africa

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Walking with baboons in the company of a Baboons Matters guide was quite an eye-opener. I arrived with a particular viewpoint and left with a changed perception of these critters.

What was my original perception?

I have grown up in Southern Africa and my perception of baboons was - intumidating, aggressive, invasive pests. I don't find them particularly attractive and certainly did not expect to find baboons in the least likeable

At this point you may be wondering why on earth I chose to go walking with them at all?

Why go walking with baboons?

I decided to go walking with baboons on impulse - I read a forum post about what a privilege it was to walk with wild primates, and how people paid a fortune to do so with gorillas and the like futher north.

"Well," I thought, "baboons ain't nearly as civilised as gorillas..."!

But the old brain processes were tickled and before I knew it...

A date with Baboon Matters

Before I knew it my fingers were dialling Baboon Matters in Simonstown and setting up a date. I could choose morning or afternoon, any day between Monday to Saturday.

Wow! Who knew there was such a demand for baboon fraternising?

Which as it turns out is all good, because there is a lack of funds to continue the monitoring project.

It's conservation, so what's new about no cash?

Anyway, the walking tour takings play a significant role to help pay the monitors - providing employment where it is desperately needed - and helping the baboon troupes stay in the business of being wild.

The baboon business - being wild

Being wild, it took a little walking and tracking to find our baboon troupe.

And find them we did.

It was a cold overcast day, but the baboons were hard at work foraging - once the monitors had got them out of the settlement!

They were cracking pine cones and munching the nuts, not to mention the delicious and nutritious clover patches.

We happened to be standing in the middle of one, when Eric - the alpha male of that particular troupe - came by to pick up a takeaway.

Unexpectedly (for me) he was totally uninterested in us. He took a few handfuls of clover leaves and then moved on to the next wild deli counter.

Why was that unexpected?

I have been accustomed to the baboons at Cape Point. They are a marauding bunch, entirely as a result of human conditioning.

At Cape Point, visiors have fed the baboons repeatedly, to the point where they now associate all humans with food. They quickly become aggressive if you do not feed them and are quite prepared to grab your backpack from you and search it like airport security.

Among the officially monitored troupes managed by Baboon Matters, the baboons ignore humans.

Critics say this is bad - that baboons in the wild should fear humans and give them a wide berth. I'm not sure about that. But at worst, the monitored troupes show that re-training seems possible - if the baboons interactions with humans are consistently food neutral - neither giving nor taking - they just treat you as an odd-looking fellow primate.

But that does not address the problem of home raiding.

Baboon home raiders - yikes

In Scarborough, Kommetjie and Simonstown the local residents get pretty fed up with having their homes and bins raided by baboons. Not to mention being harassed when they braai or picnic in their own gardens.

Fair enough. Or... NOT?

Let's put it in perspective. If I were allowed to live in the Kruger Park, say, I would predator-proof my home and garden. I would not expect the local predators to know that my property was off-limits.

Maybe if the same rigorous approach were used in the South Peninsula, the baboon troupes would begin to learn that raiding human settlements offers them no reward.

Zip. Zilch.

And in time they would go back to foraging solely on the mountains. Maybe.

It could take years. And I don't think the humans are that patient. So the baboon troupes in the Table Mountain National Park may be doomed to extinction or exile.

No more walking with baboons?

Yep, one day in the future there may be no more walks. So I highly recommend you get your walk in as soon as possible. I loved it, and the kids in my group where totally enchanted by the opportunity to watch baboon kids monkeying around.