Cape Peninsula baboons face confinement under proposed City plan. An international wildlife organisation has sounded the alarm over the City of Cape Town’s plan to capture two free-ranging chacma baboon troops from the Cape Peninsula and confine them inside a one-hectare enclosure, warning the move could lead to stress, violence and animal deaths. Animal Survival International (ASI), which operates in more than 10 countries with a focus on Africa, says the proposal raises serious animal welfare and environmental concerns and may have begun before all required legal and environmental processes were completed.
ASI campaign director Luke Barritt said the implications were severe and demanded urgent reconsideration. “ASI urges the city to urgently relook at this situation because of how serious those implications are,” Barritt said. The organisation warned that Cape Peninsula baboons are highly intelligent, socially complex wild animals that depend on large areas of mountainous and fynbos habitat.
Even troops that forage in urban areas rely on wide-ranging movement for their physical and psychological wellbeing. Confining them to a one-hectare enclosure would represent an extreme restriction of space, ASI said.
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