Cape Town’s baboons have become a bill nobody wants to pay

Cape Town has reached the point where baboons are no longer a scenic inconvenience but a municipal problem with a price tag. The city council says it will round up two troops that have repeatedly come into conflict with residents, sterilise them and move them to a newly built sanctuary. Animal rights activists are not impressed, and insist the animals should stay in the wild while the city looks harder at less destructive options.

The trouble has been building for years. Cape Town stopped culling baboon troops in the late 1990s after public pressure, and the issue has gathered force since the 2000s. In the past two years it has become far harder to ignore. A 2025 census found the population had risen by a third since 2000, from 360 baboons to 493, now arranged in 12 managed troops.

That growth has come with the sort of urban mischief that quickly stops being charming. Chacma baboons on the peninsula rip off roof sheeting, climb into unlocked cars and raid food pantries. In Simon’s Town, some stay out late to break into homes and steal snacks from convenience stores. Justin O’Riain, a behavioural ecologist at the University of Cape Town, says property values suffer when houses are covered in baboon faeces and paw prints and residents know the animals will be back the next day.

Cape Town’s geography has done it no favours. The conflict is concentrated on the Cape Peninsula, a narrow stretch from the city centre to Cape Point, squeezed between the steep protected area of Table Mountain national park and urban development that runs to the Atlantic Ocean. Joselyn Mormile, who leads the Cape Baboon Partnership, says baboons naturally seek low-lying land because it offers better access to water and more productive vegetation. The problem, of course, is that most of those places have already been built on.

The city’s management programme is expensive enough to make even a generous taxpayer blink. It costs about 20m rand for 18 months, or £920,000, with full-time rangers watching over most troops to try to prevent trouble before it starts. Under the current plan, the Waterfall and Seaforth troops are to be moved to the sanctuary, and a baboon-proof northern boundary fence will be built between urban areas and nearby mountains. The Cape Baboon Partnership had originally proposed moving four troops, but revised the plan to give the two northern troops the benefit of the doubt and see whether they could settle in the remaining space.

That has not satisfied critics. Animal rights activists have staged peaceful protests for months, and some scientists agree with them that the city should build a fence to exclude the Waterfall and Seaforth troops rather than remove the animals from their environment. O’Riain is sceptical. He argues that the baboons would simply move to the next patch of low-lying land once the fence ends, especially because there would not be enough food behind the proposed southern fenced area.

The welfare argument cuts both ways, which is part of what makes this such a stubborn dispute. Chacma baboons are not endangered, but they are already being poisoned, hit by cars, chased by dogs and shot. O’Riain says no one should ever shoot a baboon, yet warns that if people believe the authorities are not acting, they will take matters into their own hands. A few days ago, he said, a baboon was shot straight through the chest.

The larger question is whether Cape Town is paying again and again for a problem it has not really solved. Opponents of removal say taking the troops away will cause long-term psychological distress and social disruption, and that the baboons also play an ecological role by dispersing plant seeds. Those favouring removal point to the damage already done to homes, shops, property values and daily life. How many more millions of rand should be spent only to end up in the same place in another 10 years? For a city administration, that is an awkward question. For the baboons, it is the whole problem.

Written by Christiane Hofreiter christiane.hofreiter@alpineweekly.com