Feral Cities (15 page)

People should be more worried about getting attacked by their own pets. “There are roughly four million dog bites in the United States every year and between one to five incidents with a coyote per year per state. It's not that many.”

Nonetheless, the scaremongering works. Another problem Gregory is dealing with is an area in the west of the city where people hired a trapper who put down illegal snares. “I confiscated the snares and the public is really pissed off at me,” he says. “So I was driving through this area one day, just to see what was going on, and this guy who looked like Santa Claus—big white beard, big belly—starts yelling at me. ‘HEY YOU, MOTHERFUCKER. I'M TALKING TO YOU.'

“I'm like what the hell? He goes, ‘I heard you're the guy who took away those traps, you asshole, blah, blah, blah.' I said, ‘Sir, wait a second.' I had one of the snares in my truck and the guy's concerned about his cat getting killed by coyotes. I said, ‘You see this? This is what was being set at openings to fences. Any animal can get caught.'

“He went from cursing at me to cursing at the guy across the street who called the trapper and said, ‘I'm sorry I yelled at you. I didn't get the whole story.'”

The reality is, says Gregory, that trapping coyotes is not going to solve the problem. Coyotes are not going away, and people who
are worried about their pets need to think twice about leaving pets outside and alone or consider building pet enclosures in their yards.

“I try to equate this to if there is crime in your neighborhood and a burglar is arrested that has been burglarizing homes,” he says. “That doesn't mean that everyone who would burglarize homes from that point forth goes, ‘I'm never going to burglarize on that street because somebody was arrested there.'

“People have a false belief that if the coyote or raccoon or skunk is trapped that that will be it and it will never happen again. That's like believing if you remove a human there will be no more humans. That's just not realistic. In the last two centuries millions of coyotes have been killed by trappers and shot on farms and so forth. Possibly eighty million or more coyotes killed by humans. Have we solved coyotes? No. It doesn't work.

“At some point people have to stop beating their head against the wall and realize there's got to be another way.”

Jimmy was trouble. An outlaw who grew up among the destitute. An infamous gangster who terrorized the people of Simon's Town, South Africa. A thief. A killer.

Jimmy was also a baboon. His gang? A troop of baboons living on the mountains that overlook the coastal Cape Town suburb.

His life of crime began at Happy Valley Shelter, a local shelter for the homeless that was once a naval barracks. There he mingled with some of South Africa's poorest, joining them in the soup kitchen queue.

Justin O'Riain, head of the Baboon Research Unit at the University of Cape Town, still remembers the first time he saw Jimmy's troop at the shelter. “I'll never forget the first time we went there. We saw these people lining up for their free food. It was like
Oliver Twist.
Everyone was lining up for the food and sometimes they get given stale, leftover food from bakeries or what have you,” he recalls.

“That day, everyone was being handed out doughnuts. The humans tried them and went, ‘Oh, these are stale' and they, literally,
held their arms out and just behind them or next to them was this baboon troop that would go up to each person, reach out their hands and take their doughnuts. So these poor people got leftover food and, when they didn't take it, the baboons got it.”

Jimmy got his taste for human food there. Sugar-coated donuts were, after all, far more appealing than the fynbos shrubs he and the other chacma baboons on the Cape Peninsula usually ate. Even if the doughnuts were stale.

Soon the baboons were supplementing their soup kitchen visits by rifling through bins and stealing unguarded food. Eventually, the baboons' presence in the town came to the attention of city authorities. “The new biologist service provider for Cape Town came on board, goes, ‘This is ridiculous,' and starts trying to drive the baboons away,” says Justin. “Then all manner of war erupts, because the baboons are not happy with this and they fought back. They started raiding more aggressively.”

Most aggressive of all was Jimmy. His heists became legendary. He began breaking into houses, smashing windows in the dead of night to access kitchens. He raided the school, the stores, and even the naval base to load up on human food.

Jimmy was no Robin Hood. He stole from rich and poor alike. The Happy Valley Shelter, where he once ate alongside the people, also became a target, and it was there that Jimmy's actions turned deadly. “Jimmy had gone into a dormitory and picked up a bag of sugar from one of these poor people, and the guy was pretty cross,” says Justin.

A chase ensued. The man raced after the thieving primate, who bolted out of the dormitory, bag of sugar in hand. “There was an old man shuffling down a ramp, which had quite a steep drop off the edge. Jimmy wanted to get past him in a hurry, so he jumped on the old man and, with all four limbs, pushed off him to change direction and go up an alley.”

In the process, Jimmy pushed the sixty-nine-year-old off the ramp's edge. “It wasn't a big fall, but the man was old. He died of his injuries.”

What's amazing, says Justin, is that the man's death wasn't enough to bring Jimmy to justice. “Jimmy wasn't killed for that. Jimmy, an inveterate raider who would steal from poor people, wasn't put down for that.”

Jimmy followed up that incident by breaking into the home of the navy admiral's wife. “He got into her house and they had a huge fight. She tried to hit him with a broom. Jimmy grabbed the broom and started shoving it back into her. They were tugging to and fro. But even that wasn't enough to remove Jimmy the baboon.”

Jimmy finally crossed the line when he found a new gang, a baboon troop to the south of Simon's Town. There he discovered the Black Marlin, a restaurant and tourist hotspot overlooking False Bay. Inevitably, Jimmy couldn't resist the temptation to help himself to some of the Cape Malay seafood curry and grilled crayfish being served to the tourists.

“Jimmy would jump onto tables full of tourists,” says Justin. “The tourists would squeal in horror and, of course, it would be the highlight of their stories when they went home, how this baboon jumped on them and how amazing it was. But Jimmy started pushing the envelope. He started nipping them.”

In a way, it was good thing Jimmy only nipped people, says Justin. “Baboons have huge teeth and they are immensely strong. They could be killing us every day of every week and they don't. They just never seem to use their amazing weaponry on us. Even when we try to take food back from them, they will give a nip but they never use those big canines like they do on each other.”

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.”