WILD LIFERS: ‘Free of freedom’ and the case against baboon captivity

For opponents of the plan to confine Simon’s Town’s Waterfall and Seaforth troops at Kogelfontein, this is the uncomfortable arithmetic beneath the word “sanctuary”. Individual animals may live for years. Their troops have been given an expiry date.

The Wildlife Animal Protection Forum of South Africa puts it bluntly: permanent removal and sterilisation would “ensure their eventual disappearance even within captivity”. The organisation calls this the “functional extirpation” of the two troops. Less technically: a slow troop death sentence, with meals provided.

This is the objection that softer language cannot answer. A troop is a continuing community, with young replacing old, relationships developing and knowledge passing between generations. Stop reproduction and that continuity ends. The enclosure may remain. The baboons will not.

Luana Pasanisi, founder of Green Group Simonstown, has little patience with the assurance that captivity will free them from suffering.

“Well, they’ll be free of freedom,” she says. “That’s what they’re going to be free of.” For her, freedom is fundamental to the welfare of every living being. “Every creature deserves the freedom to make its own choices, to move through its natural environment and to live its life on its own terms.” She adds that she fundamentally believes in the sovereignty of all living beings, humans included.

The opposition now extends well beyond people routinely dismissed as sentimental. It includes wildlife rescuers, a national forum of 30 organisations, schoolchildren and artists. An unusually versatile human troop, although getting everyone to agree about fences remains a challenge.

Baboon art

On 19 September artists gathered at Smitswinkel Bay for a Baboon Biennale to celebrate the animals and protest against their removal. Alongside art and film, the programme explored “Baboons as our Heritage” and the foods humans and baboons share in the fynbos and along the shore.

Carin Bester’s artwork made the numbers harder to shrug off. Her installation depicted 90 inward-facing red footprints representing baboons euthanised by authorities over 26 years, surrounded by 493 outward-facing black prints representing the 2025 Peninsula census. “Each number is an individual life within a troop,” she wrote.

It is easier to erase a number from a management table than to explain where its owner should go.

Pasanisi’s contribution to the argument has involved rather more than a paintbrush. For about 15 months she managed a community-funded ranger programme for Seaforth. Employing rangers means Pasanisi has to raise funds, organise logistics and keep the rangers equipped, fed and sheltered.

Following baboons over a mountain requires legs and deep knowledge of how baboons move on the edge of the urban space. Keeping rangers there requires logistics. Her small team had bases, radios, meals and somewhere to escape the weather.

“I never wanted my men to go looking for anything.”

She says the programme cost about R30,000 a month and got Seaforth out of its urban haunts, eventually as far south as Miller’s Point. The animals foraged along the shore, ate shellfish and played around rocks. A picnic could still derail proceedings. Coexistence never came with a sandwich guarantee.

But her project challenges the claim that these baboons are beyond managing in the wild. Here was a local project with practical experience to examine. What did sustained ranger support achieve and why should that experience be written off before the animals are?

Then there are the bins.

Pasanisi says she helped baboon-proof more than a thousand wheelie bins and worked with the City to improve municipal bins in public areas. She established a circular economy with a local pig farmer to divert organic waste away from Simon’s Town Main Road where baboons were accessing it. But naval facilities and other sites continued to offer food. Humans supplied dinner, then complained about the clientele.

Waste problem

The official plan acknowledges waste as a problem. Yet its detailed waste strategy remained marked for later addition. Permanent confinement was being planned while part of the work of removing the attractions remained unfinished. That is a peculiar order in which to declare coexistence exhausted.

Pasanisi favours fencing particular attractants, especially naval properties, while protecting access to habitat and escape routes during fires. The Wildlife Animal Protection Forum SA (WAPFSA) backs assessment of a broader baboon-proof fence with researcher Dr Dave Gaynor’s expertise. Neither proposal amounts to wishing the problem away.

The forum’s 18 September letter couples fencing with secure waste systems, enforcement against feeding, monitoring and rapid maintenance. Organisations and individuals have offered financial support, conditional on an agreed design, route, cost and implementation arrangements. The money is not all settled. There is, however, an opportunity to investigate rather than an excuse to assume nothing can be afforded.

The Wildlife Animal Protection Forum SA wants capture paused, the technical and financial grounds for rejecting fencing disclosed, an urgent meeting with Gaynor and prospective funders and a transparent feasibility process with deadlines. It requested a substantive written response within seven days. Concerns about terrain, costs and displaced conflict, it argues, require design and testing, not dismissal.

The forum also warns that removal takes ecological relationships out of the landscape: seed dispersal, nutrient movement and connections between habitat patches. Baboons do not stop belonging to an ecosystem because somebody builds beside it.

Nor should taxpayers’ responsibilities become a charity collection: the forum insists that public authorities remain accountable for making coexistence work.

Danelle Murray of the Owl Rescue Centre challenges another comforting word: relocation.

“A troop isn’t simply a group of individual animals that can be caught one by one and put into a cage,” she writes. Drawing on almost 20 years of wildlife rescue, she warns of flight, panic, separation and distress spreading through the group. These are social animals, not furniture awaiting a removal van.

She also asks what became of the staged approach initially presented to the public: move Seaforth first, assess the facility, then consider proceeding further. The amended plan provides for simultaneous removal of both troops. Where, she asks, did the opportunity to learn before committing everyone disappear?

Her larger challenge concerns what welfare means. Foraging, exploring, choosing where to move and maintaining a social world are part of a baboon’s life. Keeping an animal fed does not answer every question about what has been taken away.

“The animal doesn’t get a seat at the table,” Murray writes.

And even the promise of lifelong care is conditional. The plan permits euthanasia if welfare or funding failures cannot be remedied. Captivity therefore guarantees the end of reproduction without guaranteeing survival to old age.

The Wildlife Animal Protection Forum SA rejects the choice between killing and confinement as a false one. Opposing both is perfectly consistent when measures to keep the animals wild have not been fully and fairly assessed. Asking conservation bodies to conserve wild troops should not be considered an eccentric demand.

At Reddam House Constantia, 12-year-olds Erin Smith and Shreya Miseer are collecting signatures. Erin’s request is admirably free of institutional embroidery: “We’re not saying do nothing. We are saying try the things that let them stay wild first.”

The adults have supplied many names for the enclosure. The girls are asking why the baboons have to enter it. Before the last generation is locked inside, they deserve a better answer than an official cooing “sanctuary”. DM

• Read Part 1 here.

• Read Part 2 here.

• Link to baboon resource site.

Coming tomorrow: Full board. Life term. You can check out but you can never leave