If you’re yet to see this Channel 4 documentary, then give it a watch. It’s a fascinating insight of how a baboon’s body works and how this particular ‘urban dweller’ has adapted to survive in a human dominated landscape.
This is not a plug for the channel 4 programme – I just want as many people as possible to see these incredible creatures and the sad story inflicted upon them because of humans.
The main character of this story, ‘Fred’, was a baboon living in South Africa’s, Cape Peninsula. This area has been home to the Chacma baboon for thousands of years. Then, as always, humans moved in. Cape-Town and its urban sprawl has left these monkeys trapped, with nowhere to go. They’re surviving in the last remaining areas of forest and woodland, but with a diminished food source they’ve turned to raiding local houses.
“It’s just a beautiful set up for these baboons… [they move] across the golf course into the houses, raid them for breakfast and then up the hill for a spot of lunch and a snooze, then later in the day – come back again”
‘Fred’ moved to a tourist hot spot in his young adulthood where he soon learnt that there were many opportunities for him here. His intelligence meant he rapidly rose to being the leader of his troop of 26 baboons, raiding restraunts, houses and rubbish bins on a daily basis. Even when the Cape-Town authorities installed anti-baboon locks on their rubbish bins, these animals learnt how to open them. ‘Fred’ worked out what the central locking beep on a car meant, and as soon as he’d learnt this he began raiding unlocked cars for any contents. Incredibly he didn’t raid just any car, he actually looked in them to determine whether they had anything worth his while before breaking in and stealing. Of course it was only food he was after, not money or jewellery. Eventually however, he became agressive to anything/anybody that got in his way and at this point having bitten and threatened humans, the Cape-Town authorities made the difficult choice to euthanase ‘Fred’.
'Fred' learnt how to open car doors
The Channel 4 documentary (link above) carries out a disection of ‘Fred’ to show what made him the incredible animal he was, it studies how his hands work, how his mouth/jaws are designed, how his stomach digests food, what allowed him to mate every 15 minutes and finally his relatively large brain. If you want to learn something interesting, do watch it, it’s done tastefully (suprisingly for channel 4!).
It’s not the documentary that I want to discuss here though. It’s the lethal injection to such a wonderful animal, through no fault of its own.
Some will disagree, I imagine a lot of people may even feel that it was an action that was required. At the end of the day, ‘Fred’ was a pest and when he began harming/threatening humans then yes, I understand that something needed to be done. However, we must remember that humans put him in a situation that meant he had to raid houses. It was humans afterall that destroyed his natural habitat, that forced him into being an animal that felt it had to threaten/attack humans. We see from this documentary, what an incredible creature he was, the things he learnt to do.
This post isn’t really going into too much detail, I’m just using this weeks entry as an attempt to mass communicate something that I feel that as many people must take a look at as possible. A chance to appreciate nature in its full glory. Hopefully I can generate a bit of conversation on here, please do leave a comment and take the poll, I’ll endeavour to get back to you asap.
Jack.
I am a freelance environmental author with an MSc and BSc in Environmental Sciences from The University of East Anglia. Just trying to develop social media as an effective platform for communicating and engaging with people on all things green... Please get in touch with me if you are interested, I am willing to discuss any proposals.
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