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.

Luana Pasanisi is an environmental advocate and founder of Green Group Simonstown NPC, with more than a decade of involvement in human-wildlife coexistence on the Cape Peninsula, particularly with its free-ranging chacma baboons. Through Green Group she helped establish and run the Seaforth Community Baboon Project and has represented Simon’s Town residents in formal baboon management forums.

A few days ago, an interesting article asked: What if our cities were designed for wildlife as well as people?

Writing about wildlife-inclusive cities, Saman Sobhani of Aberystwyth University 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.

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.