00:00Can Cape Town find a solution to its baboon problem?
00:03Authorities in the South African city have set out plans to round up and remove around
00:0760 Shakma baboons that are increasingly coming into conflict with the city's human residents.
00:13Cape Town is a city that derives so much of its identity, beauty and prosperity from the
00:17nature around it, and many believe that the decision to remove the baboons will be a stain
00:22on its environmental record, said the Daily Maverick.
00:24For years, baboons have been chased, paintballed, harassed and subjected to increasingly intensive
00:30forms of disruptive management.
00:33What is fundamentally a failure of environmental leadership has repeatedly been attributed to
00:37the animals themselves.
00:39Is this a new issue?
00:40Problems with baboons in the city stretch back decades, but they have reached boiling points
00:44over the past two years, said the Guardian.
00:47In the early 2000s, the city authorities stopped the culling of baboon troops in response to
00:51public pressure, but that has led to the population swelling by a third to around 500.
00:57Geography is partially to blame too, as the baboons are boxed in between the steep landscape
01:02of the Table Mountain National Park and the sprawling urban development that stretches to the Atlantic
01:08Ocean.
01:08The animals can be quite intimidating, said Reuters.
01:12Males grow up to one metre tall and weigh around 50 kilos, and they have speedily adapted to city
01:18life, raiding bins, cars and houses for food.
01:21What's been done about it?
01:22The city's baboon management measures have not only been divisive, but expensive.
01:27Full-time rangers monitor the groups as part of a programme that costs around 20 million
01:32rand, or £900,000, every 18 months.
01:36The new plans to move the baboons to a special sanctuary area have re-triggered the bitter dispute
01:41over whether they should be confined, culled or allowed to co-exist with residents.
01:46Protests are ongoing, and the issue could play a major role in Cape Town's upcoming municipal
01:51elections.
01:53So what's the solution?
01:54Early preventative action is best, said anthropologist Shirley Seastrom.
01:58Tackling undesirable baboon behaviour, like raiding food, is much harder once it's become
02:03ingrained.
02:04Translocation methods, like the one the city authorities plan, have been successful in the past,
02:09but nowadays there are very few places left where baboons can't get into trouble.
02:14Culling them is actually very difficult, due to their wily nature, and even if you succeed
02:19with one troop, another will soon take its place.
02:22We must face up to the fact that conflict between baboons and humans won't change unless
02:27human behaviour and attitudes change.
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