PRIMATE SOLUTION OP-ED: Cape Town’s baboon crisis a last-chance conservation opportunity — fund coexistence before captivity

International funders could finance targeted Simon’s Town fencing, military fence repairs and Slangkop upgrades to keep Cape Town baboons wild and reduce human-baboon conflict.

International animal welfare organisations have spent years campaigning against the removal and killing of Cape Peninsula baboons. Now there is an opportunity to do something even more powerful: put money on the ground to keep three threatened troops wild.

For more than 30 years, Cape Town has dealt with baboon conflict in a depressingly familiar cycle. Baboons enter residential areas; residents become angry or frightened; management becomes increasingly intensive; animals are injured or killed; and eventually a troop is judged too difficult to manage.

We then argue about euthanasia, relocation, sanctuaries, court cases and petitions. What if, instead, we tackled the problem earlier and more directly? The objective is actually remarkably simple: keep baboons out of high-risk human environments while keeping viable troops wild in the natural landscape around them.

That points to a practical Southern Peninsula approach built around a simple principle: keep baboons out of residential areas because this is safer for both baboons and people, while allowing the troops to remain wild in the surrounding natural landscape.

We are now running out of time to test it. The approved Cape Peninsula Baboon Management Action Plan provides for the Waterfall and Seaforth troops to be permanently removed from the wild and placed in purpose-built enclosures at Kogelfontein till their death.

Healthy males are to be vasectomised; no breeding will be allowed; no baboons will ever be released back into the wild; and if the sanctuary ultimately fails on welfare or financial grounds, the plan provides for euthanasia. Waterfall’s relocation was scheduled for September 2026 .

Meanwhile, the Slangkop troop, around Kommetjie, is struggling with continuing access to residential and commercial areas. The Action Plan itself could hardly be clearer: without strategic fencing, Slangkop “may not be considered sustainable in the long term” and “fencing is essential to prevent a need for the removal of this troop.”

So there are potentially three troops at stake: Waterfall, Seaforth and Slangkop. And, remarkably, the interventions needed to give them a chance are not mysterious technologies waiting to be invented. They are practical pieces of infrastructure and management that can be built, tested and measured.

I would like to make a direct appeal to organisations such as the International Fund for Animal Welfare (Ifaw), Animal Survival International, Humane World for Animals and to family foundations and individual philanthropists concerned with animal welfare and wildlife coexistence.

Petitions, demonstrations and legal challenges have an important place. They expose suffering, hold decision-makers accountable and sometimes stop irreversible actions. But at this stage of the Cape baboon crisis, campaigning alone cannot solve the physical problem that keeps driving the conflict: baboons can still get into towns.

A court case cannot build a boundary fence.