Feral Cities

by Tristan Donovan

  Nonetheless, nipping was bad enough, so the authorities finally brought Jimmy in. His sentence: death by lethal injection.

  Justin was among those involved in capturing him. At first all seemed to go well. Jimmy, greedy as ever, happily entered the trap to scoff the fruit inside. As the notorious baboon ate the bait, the team shut the cage door and knocked Jimmy out with a pole dart.

  Then, as they began to carry the cage indoors, Jimmy’s troop tried to save their trapped comrade. Bongo, the alpha male of Jimmy’s troop, charged at the team, who distracted him by rolling apples in his direction. Bongo stopped, stuffed the apples into his cheeks, and resumed the charge.

  The team quickly began chopping up apples and scattering the pieces. Bongo’s stomach got the better of his brain. As he scooped up the apple pieces, the team swiftly lugged the cage indoors. Jimmy’s crimes ended there.

  Jimmy isn’t the only one of the 350 or so baboons that live on the Cape Peninsula to go rogue. Combined, these large monkeys, which have dark brown to black fur and downward sloping purple-black faces, have a rap sheet to rival any Old West desperado.

  Another notorious baboon was William, the stalker of Scarborough, a small town on the eastern shore of the Cape. “He would wait for one particular woman to come back from her shopping trip,” says Justin. “He would be hiding in the bushes, and when she parked her car and had to walk the ten spaces to her house and open the sliding door, he would rush her and steal the shopping.”

  Even if she made it through the door before being mugged, she wasn’t safe. “He would physically remove the sliding door, take it off its runners, and get into the house. He would chase her into a room and then make his way quietly and calmly to the kitchen, open the fridge door, take out the butter, take out the eggs, open the cupboard, and eat the sugar. He shared all our frailties for food: he went for the refined carbohydrates and the protein—the eggs, the sugars, the pastas, and the rices.”

  One time, when the woman was eight months pregnant, she realized, after being chased into a room by William, that her three-year-old son was alone in the house with the baboon. “She kept trying to come out and he kept charging her. She was deeply traumatized as any mother would be.”

  After that the family had the door runners deepened to try to stop William from removing the door again. The day after, William broke the casing around the door’s window and got into the house again. Like Jimmy, William was captured and killed, despite public demonstrations calling for his release by local animal rights activists.

  Other Scarborough baboons have also pushed the boundaries. Some have broken into homes via pet doors or by ripping out windows. In one daring raid a troop scaled the wall of an apartment block to reach an open window. After looting the cupboard and the fridge, they left, taking a large teddy bear and a pink curtain with them.

  Similar incidents have happened across the suburbs on the Cape Peninsula. Baboons have mugged shoppers at farmers’ markets for their bags, shoved people aside to get to bins, and ripped backpacks off the backs of hikers. Rival baboon troops have even battled for control of food-rich picnic sites.

  Little gets in their way, says Justin. “Every kind of door handle, they have cracked. Baboon-proof bins, it takes them seven days to work out how to work the latches. One of the most amazing stories is there was this hole in the eaves of a house, made of soft material like Rhino Board. A baboon worked the hole, broke through the eaves, and then fell through the ceiling into the house.”

  The most famous Cape Town baboon of all was Fred, the car-jacker. “What would happen is tourists would see baboons on the side of the road sitting there looking quite sedate on a pole,” says Justin. “They would stop their car and walk up to take a photograph, leaving their car door open or closed but unlocked. Fred would watch you carefully and, if you left your door open, he would just run up and jump into the car, and go through all the bags.

  “He got to the stage where if you locked your car but were returning to it and pressed the unlock beep-beep thing, he would hear the noise, know that your car was open and get there before you, push you out of the way and get into your car.

  “One of my funniest stories ever is watching Fred and these five men. They stopped their car on the side of the road, got out with their cell phone cameras, and walked toward Fred, who was about a hundred meters down the road. Next thing, Fred sees that all four doors were open so he starts running at them. They panicked and ran back to the car. They just made it. Three in the back, two in the front, thinking: ‘Jeepers, that was close.’”

  Then Fred opened one of the car doors and jumped in. “The car jiggled and wiggled and then all four doors opened. Two of them fell out of the back onto the ground and the third man was screaming. Fred went through the car, through the glove compartments—he knew how to open all kinds of glove compartments—discovered there was only water and left.”

  Eventually, Fred’s habit of getting into cars with people inside brought his carjacking antics to an end. Fittingly, his final hours involved a car chase. After his capture, the caged baboon was loaded onto a pickup truck that then set off on a forty-mile journey to the veterinarian clinic that would administer his lethal injection. Soon the truck drivers noticed something was up. They were being followed. Behind them was Joss Lean, a filmmaker and opponent of the plan to euthanize Fred. Lean had filmed Fred’s capture and was now following the vehicle in the hope of last-minute reprieve.

  Unnerved, the drivers ferrying Fred to the vet called in an escort. Meanwhile, the South African campaign group Baboon Matters made frantic last-minute pleas for Fred’s release. But it was too late; Fred had gone too far. He was delivered to the vet and put down. A week later the activists who tried to save Fred held a candlelit wake at the Black Marlin restaurant to remember the departed animal outlaw.

  Fred’s death also revealed just how bad Cape Town’s baboon problems had gotten. “When he died we had him X-rayed,” says Justin. “He had over seventy two bits of metal in him, seventy-two different pellets: buckshot, birdshot, pellet guns, and more. He had a deeply embedded signature of conflict with people in him.”

  The discovery of Fred’s injuries proved to be a crucial moment in how Cape Town dealt with the baboons. Until then the goal was to achieve some kind of coexistence where people could live alongside the monkeys, with only the most aggressive baboons being taken out. People were encouraged to keep their doors locked and to plant native plants in their garden rather than the exotic plants baboons prefer to eat.

  In some ways the plan made sense. The baboons of the Cape Peninsula are unique, cut off from the rest of Africa’s baboons by the urban sprawl of Cape Town. What’s more, they also appear to play an important role in seed dispersal in the peninsula, much of which is a World Heritage Site, so losing them could put this valuable ecosystem at risk. In light of this the Cape baboons are protected by law.

  But what Fred’s bullet-peppered body revealed was that those who had to live with the likes of William and Jimmy were simply not going to stand aside as baboons terrorized them in their homes. In fact, attitudes toward those preaching coexistence got so bad that people started pelting them with tomatoes at public meetings.

  “The public decided that if the authorities are not going to sort them out, they were going to,” says Justin. “More and more baboons were dying terrible deaths at the hands of civilians. They were dying from dogs, from electrocutions, from poisons, and from guns. They were dying from the worst kind of gunshots; air gunshots that just pierce the gut and then cause septicemia over a five-day period, causing massive pain. Also, the public was starting to actively hate not only baboons but also wildlife in general. We were very conscious of that as a very negative consequence of urban conflict.”

  Thanks, in large part, to Fred’s bullet-ridden body, the evidence became convincing enough for animal welfare organizations like the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty of Animals to support a new approach designed to encourage baboons to stay aw
ay from people. “It was agreed that it is better to be harsh on the baboons than to allow them to get injured and killed by the public,” says Justin. “We reached a point where we said to the activists that if you care for baboons, you must scare baboons.”

  Today Cape Town has a team that works to scare baboons away from urban areas using equipment such as paintball markers and bear bangers. Justin’s next hope is that at some point the authorities will agree to erect a baboon-proof electric fence around the national park to keep them out of the urban areas. “No one likes the idea of baboons being chased with paintball markers, and although it works, some still break away. Recently they approved the killing of another baboon in Scarborough who decided he is not scared of paintball markers and is running into the town. So we’ve suggested a fence between the national park and residential area. We’ve got a lot of resistance, but I know it’s the best thing.”

  Curbing the baboon conflicts in Cape Town could also make people richer, says Justin. “There’s a lot of talk about how we should be exploiting the baboons as a tourist asset more than we do, but you can’t do that until you remove the conflict. When people go to Cape Point they want to see the baboons and that makes millions of rand. They have a serious tourist value.”

  The baboons are fun too, he adds. “They are very, very funny, entertaining animals. They are way better than any carnivore or antelope because they do crazy stuff in front of you,” he says. “They get on your car, they masturbate in front of you, and if you watch the juveniles playing it is so like humans in a playground. It’s just that humans and baboons are oil and water—they don’t mix.”

  Justin may call the baboons of Cape Town “the most troublesome nonhuman primate genus,” but there is competition. In India and Bangladesh, a different urban monkey is causing trouble: the rhesus macaque.

  They are much smaller than chacma baboons, weighing in at just seventeen pounds compared to South Africa’s eighty-eight-pound monkeys. They are shorter too, measuring around one foot seven inches tall—about half the height of a baboon. But while they appear weedier, rhesus macaques are no less troublesome. And, unlike Cape Town’s baboons, which pick on areas close to the national park, these pink-faced primates venture deep into the urban jungle.

  In Delhi and the pink-walled Indian city of Jaipur, there are thought to be tens of thousands of these brown-gray monkeys. They are adept city dwellers. They snooze on rooftops, slide down drainpipes, scamper along overhead electric cables, bathe in public fountains, and clamber up telephone poles.

  Some even use public transport. One time a rhesus macaque joined commuters on a Delhi Metro train at Chandni Chowk station. As nervous human passengers watched, he rode the Yellow Line train north, eventually ending up at the underground stop of Civil Lines, where the carriage was evacuated. After a short standoff, the monkey decided it was his stop after all and left the train.

  Like the Cape Town baboons, the macaques are not above thievery. Stall owners at Jaipur’s fruit market are regular targets, harassed daily by shoplifting monkeys out to steal their wares. Raids often start with a lone monkey that distracts the trader. Then, as the owner chases away the first monkey, the others pile in, grabbing everything they can. Each time the trader chases another away, other members get their chance to steal.

  Some carry out muggings, snatching candy from the hands of children and intimidating people by surrounding them until they hand over food. They also get into homes and offices, sneaking in through open doors and windows to ransack kitchens. Some have even broken into India’s Ministry of Defence.

  Stories about their exploits abound. These tales range from the amusing, like the macaque that repeatedly stole bottles of whiskey from a central Delhi liquor store, to the disturbing, such as a monkey kidnapping a baby through an open window. There are even reports of monkeys stealing intravenous units from patients on stretchers as they are wheeled into hospital so they can drink the liquid in the IV bags.

  It’s hard to know how exaggerated these stories are, but there’s no doubt that some encounters do turn violent. Significant numbers of people in Delhi and Jaipur have been bitten after disturbing monkeys that have broken into their homes. Others have died, often from falling after being chased or frightened by the primates. In 2004 a newlywed woman fell to her death in the eastern Indian city of Patna while running away from a group of monkeys. In 2009 a nine-year-old boy jumped to his death from the third floor of his Jaipur home in a bid to escape.

  The macaques’ most high-profile victim was Sawinder Singh Bajwa, the deputy mayor of Delhi. It was a Saturday morning in October 2007 and Bajwa was reading a newspaper on the second-floor balcony of his three-story white stucco home in the upmarket Savita Vihar neighborhood in east Delhi. As he read, a small group of monkeys turned up. They had probably come from the grounds of a nearby Hindu temple that was home to around a hundred rhesus macaques.

  The Sikh politician grabbed a stick and waved it aggressively at the monkeys, hoping to scare them away. But instead of running, the monkeys lunged at him. Startled, Bajwa stepped backward and fell off the edge of the balcony. He was rushed to the hospital but died the next day from head injuries inflicted by his thirteen-foot fall.

  Bajwa’s death prompted a swift response from the embarrassed city authorities. For years people had been campaigning for the city to do something about the monkeys, even persuading a court to order the Municipal Corporation of Delhi to act. But little had happened. Despite the sprawling Indian capital boasting as many as 60,000 macaques, the city captured just 225 in 2006. Although that’s unsurprising, given that the corporation had employed just one monkey catcher to cover the entire metropolis.

  After Bajwa’s death, the city stepped up its monkey-catching work. By the end of 2007 it had taken almost four and a half thousand monkeys off the streets—two thirds of which were trapped in the two months after Bajwa’s fatal fall.

  With monkeys being incarcerated by the thousands, the city found itself with a new challenge: what to do with them. Initially they were housed at a temporary facility, pending transfer to another location in India. But Delhi soon found that the rest of India didn’t want them, either because they already had enough monkey problems themselves or because they did not want to start importing troublesome city primates into their area. A few demanded huge sums of money for taking in the macaques.

  Eventually, Delhi opened a wildlife sanctuary on the edge of the city as a permanent home for the former street primates. Not that all the monkeys were willing to resign themselves to life in the sanctuary. Several captives scaled the walls of the facility and made their way back to the city.

  Delhi also called in help from the langur wallahs, the people who made their living from training Hanuman langur monkeys to perform tricks on the city streets. Rhesus macaques are frightened of these larger, gray-furred and black-faced monkeys, so the city figured they could be used to scare the monkey menace away. Soon langur wallahs became regular sights in the richest districts of Delhi as they patrolled the streets with langurs on leashes and encouraged their performing monkeys to urinate on the walls to keep the macaques away. Delhi Metro Rail even hired one for a month to patrol Kashmere Gate, one of the city’s largest stations.

  The plan went well until, in November 2012, the Indian government notified the city that using langurs in this way breached wildlife protection laws. The city reluctantly abandoned the langur patrols and found itself having to advise staff to keep their office windows shut at all times to keep the macaques at bay.

  If Delhi’s response to dealing with the monkeys seems halfhearted, that’s because it is. For Hindus, monkeys are more than just monkeys—they are gods. Monkeys of all kinds, rhesus macaques included, are seen as living representatives of Hanuman, the monkey-faced god that gave langurs their name.

  Hanuman is an important figure in Hindu scripture. In the Hindu epic of Ramayana, he rescues Sita, the wife of Rama—the seventh incarnation of the supreme god Vishnu—from the demon
king Ravana. After searching the land, Hanuman finds Ravana and, backed by an army of monkeys, defeats him in a fierce battle. The subsequent reunion of Rama and Sita came to represent the victory of good over evil in the religion.

  One tradition that grew out of his story is that on Tuesdays and Sundays, many Hindus make offerings of grain and fruit to Hanuman at temples dedicated to him. For city-dwelling rhesus macaques this belief means they are welcomed on the grounds of temples and are regularly provided with large amounts of food by the devoted.

  As Delhi’s wildlife warden told the New York Times in 2012: “Some communities in the city feed the monkeys by the carful. They do not give a care about the hungry children on the street, but will feed the monkeys.” Deliberate feeding of the monkeys is so common that the Delhi authorities have even argued that the macaques are no longer wildlife and, therefore, not their problem.

  Unsurprisingly, the bountiful supplies of food have made cities highly attractive to rhesus macaques. In 1980 only 15 percent of rhesus macaques had any contact with people. Today 86 percent have contact with people. Urban expansion explains some of that shift, but the monkeys are also choosing to live in the cities.

  For the monkeys that do leave rural life behind, life is often better, as demonstrated by a study in the city of Dhaka, Bangladesh. Hoping to see how a steady supply of food from people altered the behavior of rhesus macaques, researchers compared the activities of a group of eighty macaques living on the grounds of a pharmaceutical factory in central Dhaka with another group living in a rural area more than forty miles to the north.

  The city group was pampered to say the least. Each day a government driver would turn up to deliver four hundred bananas for them to feast on. On top of that the drugs company, Sadhona Traditional Pharmaceutical, would give the monkeys eleven pounds of chickpeas for breakfast before returning in the afternoon with another chickpea meal. Then there were the wild and garden plants in a nearby park that the monkeys could help themselves to. And, as if that wasn’t quite enough, visitors regularly turned up to supply the macaques with treats of bread, crackers, and cookies.