---
title: "Removing the Simon’s Town baboons: The wealth we cannot buy back"
description: "Our biodiversity is wealth. Our functioning habitat is wealth. The continued presence of wild populations within an increasingly human-dominated landscape is wealth. If that is true, we are choosing to make ourselves poorer."
type: "OpinionNewsArticle"
publisher: "Daily Maverick"
site: "https://www.dailymaverick.co.za"
section: "Maverick Earth"
author: "Luana Pasanisi"
author_url: "https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/author/luana-pasanisi/"
canonical_url: "https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/2026-08-26-removing-the-simon-s-town-baboons-the-wealth-we-cannot-buy-back/"
published: "2026-08-26T16:56:52"
lang: "en-ZA"
word_count: 1223
---

# Removing the Simon’s Town baboons: The wealth we cannot buy back

> Our biodiversity is wealth. Our functioning habitat is wealth. The continued presence of wild populations within an increasingly human-dominated landscape is wealth. If that is true, we are choosing to make ourselves poorer.

By Luana Pasanisi · Published 26 August 2026, 18:56 SAST

## Content

A few days ago, [an interesting article](https://phys.org/news/2026-08-cities-wildlife-people.html) asked: What if our cities were designed for wildlife as well as people?

Writing about wildlife-inclusive cities, [Saman Sobhani of Aberystwyth University](https://phys.org/news/2026-08-cities-wildlife-people.html) describes efforts to restore habitat, reconnect fragmented green spaces and design human settlements with other species in mind. In Britain, swifts have lost nesting spaces beneath eaves and roof tiles as buildings are renovated. Scotland has responded by requiring swift bricks, small nesting cavities built into new developments. As Sobhani puts it: “The issue isn’t simply how we can make cities greener. It’s who we think cities are for.”

How many South Africans are aware that two free-ranging troops of chacma baboons are facing permanent removal from the Cape Peninsula? Waterfall and Seaforth troops are not rescued animals, unreleasable animals or animals without a home to return to. They are functioning social troops, living wild near Simon’s Town, alongside a national park, in one of the most biologically extraordinary regions on Earth. While cities elsewhere are asking how to bring wildlife back, we are taking ours away.

That contradiction should concern us far beyond Simon’s Town, because perhaps the question before us is not simply what happens to two troops of baboons. Perhaps it is what, in the world we are entering, we actually consider valuable. What is proposed deserves scrutiny, particularly because both the site and the language surrounding the facility have changed.

When the plan was publicly announced in November 2025, the proposed facility on private land near Plateau Road was described as a baboon sanctuary. The proposal was presented as a staged process, with Seaforth to be relocated first and the facility assessed before the proposal proceeded further.

![Opinion-Pasanisi-wildlife-wealth](https://cdn.dailymaverick.co.za/i/947ncwYuW40mQNvRO23PhK0YzXo=/200x100/smart/filters:strip_exif\(\)/file/attachments/orphans/PHOTO-2024-12-11-11-18-38_645958.jpg)

*Martello and sons of the Seaforth troop, Circa November 2024. (Photo: GGST)*

### Permanent captivity — why?

The site has since moved to City-owned land at Kogelfontein. In the June 2026 Amended Final Baboon Action Plan, the terminology changes too. Kogelfontein is described as an Urban Wildlife Centre that will accommodate both the Seaforth and Waterfall troops in two enclosures. Both troops will be captured. Healthy males will be vasectomised, and healthy animals permanently moved into the enclosures. There will be no breeding, no additional baboons, and no release back into the wild.

These are not individual rescued or unreleasable animals being given refuge because they can no longer survive independently. They are functioning, free-ranging social troops being deliberately removed from the landscape in which they currently live, with no prospect of those populations reproducing or returning to the wild.

There are reasonable questions to be asked about how the proposal evolved, what evidence supports permanent confinement of both troops and what happened to the staged process initially presented to the public. Those questions become even more important when considered alongside the Action Plan’s own objective of achieving a Cape Peninsula baboon population that is “healthy, as free-ranging as possible”.

Whatever terminology is used- sanctuary, zoo, enclosure or Urban Wildlife Centre- the fundamental question is not what we call the facility. It is what we are doing to the animals. Why did permanent captivity become the solution?

### The animal becomes the problem

The so-called human-wildlife conflict does not occur in a vacuum. We remove vegetation, fragment habitat, build roads and houses, alter food availability through poorly managed waste, increase traffic and recreational pressure and introduce fences, dogs, security systems and infrastructure into landscapes occupied by other species. Wildlife then does what successful species have always done: it adapts. Yet when that adaptation brings animals into the environments we have constructed, increasingly it is the animal that becomes the problem.

We have become sophisticated at managing wildlife while far less willing to manage ourselves. We monitor, deter, relocate and enclose animals, while waste, development, roads, habitat fragmentation and our growing demand for space rarely receive the same intensity of intervention.

In 2024, Green Group Simonstown developed an alternative idea: to reimagine our relationship with the mountain itself. In this proposal, trained rangers would not simply move baboons away from people. Based on the mountain, they would help protect the whole living system: watching for fires, deterring poaching and illegal hunting, restoring neglected areas and, over time, regenerating habitat and creating opportunities for research. That project was never given the opportunity to be implemented. But its central principle remains valid: baboon management cannot meaningfully be separated from the landscape in which the human-wildlife interface occurs.

### The wealth of intact living systems

[Recent research in People and Nature](https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/pan3.70349), spanning 168 countries, examines biodiversity, poverty, governance and historical exploitation, and challenges assumptions about who carries the costs of conservation and who receives its benefits. Who decides what successful conservation looks like? Who bears the loss when wild animals disappear? Who benefits from the removals? And where are the interests of the animals themselves, the wider ecosystem and future generations?

The [2025 Planetary Health Check](https://www.planetaryhealthcheck.org/) found that seven of nine planetary boundaries regulating Earth-system stability have now been breached. This context is not irrelevant. Functioning natural systems become more precious precisely as they become more scarce. Environmental loss has a peculiar way of teaching us the importance of things only as they begin to disappear. For centuries, we have confused wealth with what we can extract from the living world, valuing the tree once it becomes timber, land once it becomes property and wildlife once it produces an economic return. But nature has worth beyond its usefulness to us, simply because intact living systems are the foundation on which everything else stands.

Perhaps the great recalculation of this century will be understanding the immense value of what remains alive. Clean water is wealth. Healthy vegetation is wealth. Biodiversity is wealth. Connected habitat is wealth. Wild populations that have survived alongside expanding human settlements are wealth. These are not sentimental luxuries. They are living capital and resilience, and once spent, they cannot simply be bought back.

![Opinion-Pasanisi-wildlife-wealth](https://cdn.dailymaverick.co.za/i/inHsF6N4ASX03SrDTrsA9CJwT_k=/200x100/smart/filters:strip_exif\(\)/file/attachments/orphans/B47E2774-1A1B-4080-A528-912C9B433C69_614715.jpg)

*Waterfall troop members looking over Simonstown. (Photo: Luana Pasanisi / GGST)*

### An inheritance we can’t buy back

Which brings us back to Simon’s Town. Our biodiversity is wealth. Our functioning habitat is wealth. The continued presence of wild populations within an increasingly human-dominated landscape is wealth. If that is true, we are choosing to make ourselves poorer. Removing the Waterfall and Seaforth troops is not simply the removal of a problem. It is the liquidation of a wealth we cannot buy back.

There may come a time when a community’s wealth is measured not by property values or development, but by how much living richness it had the foresight to keep. Simon’s Town already holds that wealth: here mountain, ocean and extraordinary biodiversity meet, and wild animals still move through a landscape increasingly shaped by people. That is not a failure of modernity. It is an inheritance. It is our natural heritage.

Coexistence requires intelligent management, properly managed waste, appropriate development, enforcement and compromise. But coexistence cannot mean wildlife endlessly adapting to us while we refuse to adapt to wildlife.

If we cannot find a way to live alongside wildlife here, with knowledge and resources available to us, then what does the City of Cape Town’s [Living Alongside Wildlife programme](https://resource.capetown.gov.za/documentcentre/Documents/City%2520strategies,%2520plans%2520and%2520frameworks/Directorate_Executive_Summary_2025-2026.pdf) actually mean? And if living alongside wildlife does not include making space for the baboons with whom we already share this town, where, in the end, are wild animals supposed to live? **DM**