WILD LIFERS: Drawing the line on Cape Town’s baboons

In the case of baboons in Simon’s Town, the answer is we’re not: they’re marked for complete removal to a fenced area from which they will never escape for the rest of their lives.

As that day looms, the battle between pro-stay groups and City officials planning the removal is escalating. Demonstrations, posters, baboon solidarity days and officials convinced they’re doing the right thing for baboon and citizen safety – it’s a confusing space to negotiate.

But Maverick Earth took a deep breath and decided to try to sort the scat from the sagacity. In this series we’ll look at the official position, the science around baboon management, citizens who are appalled at the impending imprisonment and the forever sanctuary itself. Then, in fairness, we’ll ask a baboon for comment.

Today, we start with the official plan.

The cost of peace

Cape Town has many ways to start an argument, but few are as reliable as mentioning baboons. Everyone has an opinion. Offer yours and, before the kettle has boiled, you may find yourself defending a fence, a primate or the future of civilisation.

Keeping the peace is expensive, too. The City has committed R33-million over three financial years to baboon management. Spread across roughly 600 Peninsula baboons, that works out at about R18,000 per animal per year. That is a rough division of promised funding, rather than a bill for services rendered. It may cover only part of the cost.

Following the money requires some agility. A separate City announcement lists R15-million for Shark Spotters, whose Cape Baboon Partnership runs the ranger programme. Is that included in the original commitment, a revised allocation or something else?

Then there’s R10-million allocated to the Urban Wildlife Centre at Kogelfontein near Scarborough, where about 60 baboons are due to become permanent residents, housed and fed for the rest of their lives.

Of these, according to Sarah Waries who is coordinating enclosure construction, 44 will be from the Waterfall troop and 16 from the Seaforth troop. They will be housed in separate sections of the enclosure which, she says, was designed around these numbers.

Their proposed move comes with an expensive 46-page action plan. The paperwork is substantial. Establishing exactly what has been allocated, what has been spent and who will pay the continuing bills takes rather more digging.

The authorities, meanwhile, are busy drawing lines. A baboon can negotiate a cliff face, a troop hierarchy and the catch on a kitchen window. A boundary on a management map is a trickier proposition.

On one side are houses, farms and the tempting contents of bins. On the other is the place where baboons are supposed to be baboons. Persuading an intelligent, hungry animal to honour this arrangement is where the trouble starts.

Enter the Cape Peninsula Baboon Management Action Plan, amended in June 2026. Produced jointly by the City, CapeNature and SANParks, it proposes firmer boundaries, population limits and, for two troops, permanent captivity. The intention is to give daily crisis management its marching orders. There is also a City-sponsored Baboon Advisory Group.

Dearth of solutions

The promise is appealing: healthier baboons, ranging as freely as possible, with less interference and fewer collisions with human life. But “as freely as possible” does quite a lot of work in this document.

The plan also admits that the authorities have not covered themselves in glory. Years of divided responsibilities, indecision and firefighting have left both species worse off. Legal threats and polarised activism take some of the blame, but the authorities acknowledge their own failure to develop sustainable solutions.

Their diagnosis is a population squeeze. According to the plan, numbers rose from roughly 360 baboons in 10 troops in 2000 to more than 600 in 17 troops in 2024. Meanwhile, development has eaten into the low-lying land where baboons like to forage. The suburbs, inconveniently, keep restocking the pantry.

To a passing motorist, the mountain may look like acres of perfectly serviceable baboon country. Lunch, however, is not distributed evenly across a view. The authorities argue that the remaining habitat cannot simply replace the productive lowlands now occupied by people. We’ll return to that argument in the next article.

Four troops have been singled out: Constantia 1 and 2, Waterfall and Seaforth. The plan describes them as breakaway groups that settled in marginal habitat beside human communities, with restricted access to suitable lowland foraging. All are marked for removal from their present ranges, but they will not be travelling to the same destination.

For Waterfall and Seaforth, the destination is the fenced Urban Wildlife Centre at Kogelfontein, on City-owned land. The Cape Baboon Partnership would trap them, arrange veterinary assessments, vasectomise healthy males and move the healthy animals into two separate enclosures.

In response to questions from the citizens’ group Keep Cape Peninsula Baboons Wild, the City said mature females would receive contraceptive implants, replaced every two to three years. These “would provide additional protection against breeding and reduce aggression associated with sexual cycling”.

Family planning, then, would be firmly in human hands. There would be no breeding, no additional baboons and no return to the wild. The troops would live out their lives there. The main plan does not give the enclosure sizes; we will take a closer look at the accommodation in a later article.

The authorities describe many Waterfall baboons as being in poor physical condition, highly accustomed to people and vulnerable to human-caused injuries and deaths. Seaforth, they say, also threatens the critically endangered African penguin colony. In a subsequent response, they made their purpose explicit: the centre is an alternative to culling these two troops, rather than a conservation outcome.

Lethal consequences

There is a grave condition attached. If welfare problems or a shortage of operating funds cause the sanctuary to fail, and the situation cannot be remedied, the animals would be euthanised under a CapeNature permit with SPCA oversight.

The Constantia troops would get a different set of moving instructions. They would be released on the mountain side of a new northern fence, with rangers patrolling and maintaining the barrier between natural habitat, farms and residential areas. The hope is that they will settle there. The plan itself, however, rates the likelihood of success as very low because of the limited low-lying habitat.

Crossing back would have lethal consequences. Baboons breaching a functioning northern fence would be killed. Exceptions cover power failures, damaged fencing, opened wildfire escape panels and dispersing males using the Orpen Road biodiversity corridor. For the Constantia troops, moving north over Constantia Nek would also trigger lethal removal.

Elsewhere, strategic fencing would help manage Slangkop around Capri and Heron Park. Rangers would use tracking information to stop the Smitswinkel troop moving into the space vacated around Simon’s Town. Evicting one troop only to find another inspecting the neighbourhood is plainly not the intended result. A Murdoch Valley fence could follow if needed.

The population would have a ceiling as well as a fence: 250 managed baboons in the north and 175 in the south, excluding about 100 living strictly inside the Cape of Good Hope reserve. These figures take account of habitat, but also budgets, conflict and welfare. They are management limits, rather than a simple calculation of how many mouths the vegetation can feed.

If a regional limit is exceeded for more than six months, the authorities would reduce numbers through euthanasia, targeting animals including the chronically sick, permanently injured and very old. New breakaway groups entering unsuitable areas would be herded back. Persistent leaders could be killed.

The ethical argument is uncomfortable and deliberate: declining to kill an animal does not necessarily spare it suffering. The plan’s authors acknowledge baboon intelligence and sentience, but argue that intervention, including killing, can sometimes prevent greater harm and violent deaths.

Humans have homework, too. A proposed Urban Wildlife Management Bylaw would strengthen penalties for harming or habituating baboons and require protective measures for new developments beside or within their habitat. Households, businesses and institutions, including the Navy, would have to attend to their waste. Bins and compost heaps feature prominently. The detailed waste strategy, however, remains an item to be added later in this version of the plan.

There are practical welfare promises: water where fences cut off natural sources, efforts to bury power cables, interim protection against electrocution, veterinary assessments and panels that open to let wildlife escape fires. The authorities also want less reliance on paintballs, noise and the daily business of persuading baboons to be somewhere else.

Even so, nobody is promising every resident a baboon-free address. The plan allows for occasional visits in some suburbs and more frequent passage in others. People living in natural habitat are expected to protect their properties and respect the animals’ presence. A baboon walking past the gate would not, by itself, constitute a failure of government.

Research into contraception and genetic enrichment would inform a major review in 2030, with monitoring and proposed smaller annual reviews along the way. By then, the authorities hope to have healthier baboons and considerably fewer emergencies to deal with.

Campaigners have asked for a pause in capture and removal to allow independent scrutiny. The Cape Peninsula Baboon Management Joint Task Team has declined, arguing that delay would prolong harm to baboons and residents. Its response ends with little room for interpretation: “The Action Plan has been approved and will be implemented.”

On paper, the lines are drawn. The baboons, who have spent years finding ways around our arrangements, will now encounter boundaries with far less room for negotiation. Whether that makes their lives safer is the promise this plan has to keep. DM

The next instalment in this series tomorrow: The wicked problem of controlling baboons