Cape Town - They stroll into kitchens, shops and restaurants, grab their favourite snack and head for the hills. Barrydale, situated along the R62, is being overrun by baboons hunting for freebies.
Every morning Colette Teale, who operates an animal rescue shelter near the town, wakes up to feed her 35 dogs only to have a troop of baboons watching her from the surrounding mountains.
“They wait for me to turn my back so they can run down and snatch dog food from the bowls,” she said.
Terry Williams, who owns the shop Jam Tart on the R62, said they have two male baboons who could be called two of the shop’s best customers (although they have never paid a cent).
“They will often walk into the shop and snatch a packet of biscuits,” she said.
Closing the doors didn’t help because the baboons had figured out how to open them. She said they could often be seen on the other side of the road, chomping on cookies and “laughing” at the store’s employees’ inability to do anything about it.
According to Teale, the baboon population has ballooned and continues to grow at a pace that cannot be sustained. This has led starving baboons into Barrydale, to try to pilfer from stores and restaurants, braving electric fences, guard dogs and traps, to tear through gardens and fruit trees.
Teale said many residents were forced to erect electric fences. But even that isn’t enough – one resident complained that the baboons would run screaming at her electric fence and climb over it.
She said that current “antiquated” methods of dealing with the problem were not effective. Baboon monitors didn’t deter the animals and shooting them was not the answer. “We have to sterilise the population before this gets out of hand,” she said.
But Corne Claassen, CapeNature conservation manager in the area, said permission to have the animals sterilised had been denied based on ethical and ecological grounds.
Monitors are still an effective way of dealing with the problem, he said.
“The idea of intervention is to alter baboon behaviour, so that they will satisfy their social and nutritional needs in the natural environment, instead of targeting easy pickings,” he said.
Stefan Van Niekerk, who owns a fruit store in the area, said the baboons were a massive problem.
“They just run in here and grab fruit and nuts, it’s like a hit and run,” he said.
Mike Clarke, who owns the restaurant Clarke of the Karoo, said when he was based on the R62 he constantly had problems with baboons. - Cape Argus