Killing is not mitigation for baboon management on the Cape Peninsula

‘We had to destroy the village in order to save it!” This phrase, attributed to a US officer who defended his troops’ destruction of the town of Bến Tre, was adopted by the anti-war movement to expose the perverted logic underlying America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. A recent article in Daily Maverick seems to employ a similar line of reasoning to justify the authorities’ intention to kill several troops of baboons on the Cape Peninsula: we are told that we must kill the baboons in order to save them. 

The argument goes something like this: baboons that enter urban areas often die painful deaths – they are shot, hit by cars, attacked by dogs or electrocuted on uninsulated power lines. By killing them pre-emptively, one replaces an inhumane death with a humane one. To quote the DM article: “By removing the baboon, you prevent the damage it causes, limit the chances of negative behaviour (e.g. entering houses for food) being passed on to other troop members, and replace a protracted, painful death with a comparatively good one – one that millions of people choose to alleviate the suffering of pets.” 

The authorities, we are told, are doing the baboons a favour by killing them: forced to choose between allowing them to die a painful death or humanely euthanising them, the ethical choice is clearly the latter. How could such an argument not be reasonable?  

The first problem is that the argument is in the form of a false dilemma: either baboons are killed humanely or inhumanely. But killing is not the only option available; this Ms Beamish concedes, but she does not discuss the alternatives, making it seem as though killing is the default option. Even the decision by the authorities to remove the baboons from the peninsula one way or another, is simply taken as a fait accompli. 

A second problem is that the argument does not pick out relevant similarities, which any good argument by analogy must do. Baboons are not dying from unavoidable terminal, painful conditions. The relevant analogy to the pre-emptive killing of baboons is something more like the following: imagine that someone was luring dogs onto his property with tasty treats. His neighbours, annoyed by the influx of animals into their neighbourhood, shoot the dogs and bait them with poisoned food. The authorities respond – not by punishing the individuals who poison or shoot the dogs, or by fining the man who feeds them – but by killing the dogs, arguing that “by removing the dog, you prevent the damage it causes, limit the chances of negative behaviour (e.g. entering houses for food) being passed on to other pack members, and replace a protracted, painful death with a comparatively good one”. No one would argue that killing the dogs in this scenario is in any way defensible – and yet this is what we are asked to accept with regard to the baboons. 

The analogy between this imaginary case and the situation of the baboons holds further because the mitigating strategies that the authorities have themselves identified for the past 20 years or so as being necessary to safeguard baboons or keep them out of urban areas have not been implemented. There are no baboon-proof bins, no effective traffic calming, no strategic fences, no insulation of power lines, and no one has been prosecuted for violating waste-management by-laws. Not a single person has been brought to book for shooting a baboon. This is scandalous. 

The only tools implemented by the authorities are pain aversion tactics (paint balls) and killing: to date more than 80 baboons have been killed via the protocols over the past decade. Even since the mishandling of Kataza by the authorities in 2020 there have been further sanctioned killings under the protocols. 

The author talks of “decision paralysis” but the only decision paralysis seems to be with respect to the implementation of the very mitigation strategies that the authorities and their experts have been recommending for decades. Killing baboons has not been a last resort, but is all too often the go-to solution in the management of these primates. 

The article makes claims regarding the ethical treatment of baboons, yet ethical deliberation has been notoriously absent from baboon management on the peninsula. In June/July 2025, the Cape Peninsula Baboon Management Joint Task Team (JTT) “convened a panel of independent experts to review and provide critiques of the draft 2025 Cape Peninsula Baboon Management Action Plan”. Although the draft plan presented to the JTT mentions the word “ethics”, “ethical” or “ethically” more than 80 times, the expert panel did not include an ethicist, despite being provided with the names of several suitable ones. 

One of the experts on the panel noted that “research institutions in South Africa are legally required to obtain ethical approval for any activity involving animals” and yet “coercive wildlife management actions, often more disruptive and potentially lethal, proceed without equivalent ethical scrutiny”. The JTT responded by claiming: “It is not a legal requirement to submit management plans to ethics committees.” One would think that the team tasked with the responsibility of conserving and protecting indigenous primates, and which acknowledges the importance of treating the baboons humanely, would want its management plans to be in line with the highest ethical standards, irrespective of whether there is a legal requirement to do so. On the positive side, the JTT did promise that “an ethical review and justification will be included” in the amended action plan; we keep our fingers crossed. 

Treating the baboons ethically is essential because they have moral status. What this means is that they have interests which we, as moral agents, are obliged to protect. Removing baboons from the peninsula is not akin to removing alien shrubs. The various reports issued by the authorities speak of the importance of treating baboons in a humane way, and of the importance of their welfare. Such language makes sense only on the assumption that baboons have moral status, and their moral status is in virtue not only with respect to their sentience – their ability to feel pleasures and pains – but also with respect to their sapience – their highly developed cognitive, emotional and social capacities. 

Given the moral status of baboons, it would be unethical to kill them without very good justification, and the pre-emptive killing argument does not amount to one. 

The argument fails to recognise that death itself is a harm; certainly, dying a painful death is worse than dying a relatively painless one, but the lesser of two evils is still an evil, not a good. It is important to note that killing a baboon causes further harm by way of psychological distress to remaining troop members. 

To prevent unlawful killings or accidental deaths, authorities should prosecute offenders who unlawfully shoot at baboons, and put in place the various mitigation strategies to prevent baboons from entering urban areas. Until such strategies have been tried, the killing of baboons should not even be one strategy among several: it should be off the table completely. 

Strangely, this is exactly what the author of the article herself has supported; she and Professor O’Riain argued against the killing of two male baboons in Knysna in 2021. They argued that lethal methods should not be employed until all mitigation strategies had been exhausted, and wrote that “there has been no attempt to prevent the baboons from entering urban areas using humane and scientifically evaluated non-lethal methods. These include trained field rangers and baboon-proof fences, which seek to prevent spatial overlap between baboons and urban areas.” What was true of Knysna in 2021 is true of Cape Town in 2025. 

So the appropriate and ethical response is not to kill the baboons, thus exacerbating the harm done to them. 

It is worrying that the justifiable outrage towards, and concern about, the killing of baboons is criticised as “clickbait”, as though NGOs want to manufacture outrage for the mere sake of it. If the authorities truly acknowledge the moral status of baboons, as they should, they would understand and empathise with such concern, not criticise it. Instead of contemplating killing baboons, the authorities should put in place the appropriate mitigation strategies to keep baboons out of urban areas. Cape Town rightly prides itself on its conservation efforts during the 2018 drought, winning an International Water Association award for its efforts in reducing water consumption – yet we’re told that it’s impossible to clean up our own waste! 

The way to reduce conflict between humans and wildlife is not to remove the wildlife! On this logic, we’ll end up with a country devoid of wild animals; the authorities have an obligation to preserve and protect our wildlife, and it is imperative that we find ethical and workable ways to keep both humans and wildlife safe. The main cause of human-wildlife conflict results from human behaviour – the eradication of natural habitat, the destruction of wilderness, urban development, the failure to control waste management, and so on. Killing indigenous animals further destroys biodiversity and is thus not only unethical in terms of the moral status of individual baboons, but it is also problematic regarding the imperative to maintain biodiversity, especially within a World Heritage Site. Would we talk so cavalierly about killing our indigenous primates were they chimps, orangutans or gorillas? One wonders. The fact that the former are apes and the latter monkeys is irrelevant to the moral issue at hand.

Too many baboons have already died; in addition to the 80 or so baboons killed by the authorities, Baboons of the South notes 177 human-induced deaths between June 2013 and June 2024, as well as 80 more unaccounted-for deaths over and above 250 natural deaths. The authorities talk about killing more animals as a “hard reset” to enable good management, but there is no guarantee that future baboons will be safe. If future management is anything like the past, then, given that killing has been routinely implemented over the past two decades, the future of the baboons on the peninsula looks grim indeed. DM

Elisa Galgut is an associate professor in the Department of Philosophy, University of Cape Town. She is also a Trustee of Baboon Matters.