Cape Town baboon monitors get their paintball guns back

The use of paintball guns to keep baboons out of residential areas of Cape Town can resume, CapeNature and the Cape of Good Hope Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) said on Wednesday.

The national SPCA withdrew its support for baboon monitors' use of paintball guns in May after a juvenile animal was found dead in a Simon's Town garden after being shot with a pellet gun.

The City of Cape Town said it was worried about the ban, because its monitors had found paintball guns were the most effective way of protecting residents from baboons and safeguarding the primates from the dangers they face in urban areas.

In a statement on Wednesday, CapeNature and the Cape SPCA said the paintball ban had led to a steep increase in the baboon visits to urban areas.

“Given the lack of an immediately available effective alternative and the significant negative consequences for baboons and members of the public resulting from increasing habituation of baboons in urban areas, the authorities agreed that the humane use of paintball markers should be reinstated in the interim, and under a revised paintball marker standard operating procedure,” they said.

The new procedure “has specifically addressed the conditions under which paintball markers can be used without causing unnecessary suffering”, they said.

Cape of Good Hope SPCA chief inspector Jaco Pieterse said the new procedure specified conditions for humane use of paintball guns.

“We have no legal power to prohibit the use of paintball markers to deter baboons, but the indiscriminate use of paintball markers, fired at point-blank range at any animal, may cause unnecessary suffering and therefore may constitute a criminal and prosecutable offence in terms of the Animals Protection Act,” he said.

CapeNature director Ernst Baard said swift action was needed to reduce the risk to humans and baboons from the primates' return to urban areas, and to ensure compliance with the new procedure for paintball guns.

The statement said the reintroduction of the guns was an interim step “while critical aspects of governance, regulation, agreements and plans for baboon management as well as the city’s approach to its urban baboon monitoring programme are being reviewed”.

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