Learning to Speak Baboon

As soon as I pull out the top drawer of the rickety dresser to unpack my clothes, I am greeted by a virtual army of the largest cockroaches I have ever seen. When I attempt to adjust the mirror and various prints that hang helter-skelter on the wall, spiders in as many sizes, shapes and colors as spring wildflowers emerge from beneath and head for cover.

I then venture next door to "Rita's house," which doubles as sleeping quarters for two of the youngest caged troops. The woman I encounter is not all that different from the person I first saw on Animal Planet -- essentially charmless (in the most superficial sense), utterly direct and more than willing to dispense with the usual preliminaries. Nonetheless, she seems relatively glad to have me there and suggests we go for a walk.

Along the banks of the Olifants, the "resident" troop of wild baboons are serenely engaged in their late afternoon grooming. "Oh, Michael," Rita says in the somewhat mournful, and slightly world-weary, way that will start so many of our conversations, "what we are doing here so often seems utterly hopeless, and yet we have to keep on, since no one else is going to do it."

Everywhere around us, like a group of monks engaged in their evening meditation, free-roaming baboons are simply sitting around, gazing at the river or quietly grooming one another. "The perfect peace emblem," baboon researcher Shirley Strum has written in her widely respected book, "Almost Human," "should not be a dove, but two baboons grooming." Watching the bucolic near-dusk scene that unfolds before us, I can appreciate what she means.

Rita points out a group of bush bucks beneath the trees ahead of us, and then, in rapid succession, a number of animal tracks that are right at our feet -- hippo, monitor lizard, water buffalo, water buck. "You can live here very peaceably with the animals," she says, pointing out a rather immense crocodile sunbathing on the other side, "if you just learn to respect them and keep out of their way."

Baboons are hardly the Earth's most beloved creatures. For one, they are not readily amenable to being dressed in overalls or lederhosen and paraded like kindergarten children onto "The Late Show With David Letterman." What's more, when full-grown, they develop not the relatively flat, universally beloved, human-like faces of chimpanzees and bonobos, but an elongated, snout-like visage, reminiscent of dogs. Third -- and most significantly -- they are, rather than stupid, so fiercely resourceful and smart that they can easily become pests to anyone whose house or car they put their minds to getting into.

The frequent hostility between human and baboon -- fueled mostly by ignorance -- has also produced a series of myths and fabrications that have endured for hundreds of years. The Khoisan people, who originally occupied much of sub-equatorial Africa as hunter-gatherers, believed baboons were people in an altered state of consciousness. Other African tribes believed they possess mysterious powers usually attained only by shamans and witch doctors.

In South Africa, however, the present-day fate of baboons has been far less romantic. It was not many years ago that people still received a monetary reward for handing in a baboon scalp and tail. Even more recently, baboons could be -- and were -- shot on sight by farmers and others as mere "vermin." Contemporary folk tales in Africa and elsewhere freely portray them as stupid and lazy, and in most cultures, including our own, it is still considered an insult to be called a "baboon."

With human settlements increasingly encroaching on what was once their natural habitat and the infant mortality rate among baboons often as high as 70 to 80 percent, baboon troops have now vanished from roughly 80 percent of South Africa's Cape Peninsula.

It's precisely this trend that Rita and the staff of C.A.R.E., led by Lee and senior animal keeper Bennett Serane, have set out to reverse. In the nearly 20 years of the foundation's existence, some dozen troops of once-orphaned baboons, numbering roughly 250, have been returned to the wild all around South Africa -- a process so time-consuming it could easily occupy five times Rita's staff. Not only must the staff locate the appropriate release sites, apply for permits and prepare troops for release and transport, but at least two staff members must be dispatched to the site for up to five months to make sure the baboons can successfully forage on their own. Of the innovative practices Rita and the staff of C.A.R.E. have created, most significant has been the "artificial" formation of coherent troops to be re-released into the wild. Until Rita began combining compatibly aged, sexed and spirited baboons into troops within the cages, it was virtually taken for granted that baboon troop formation was a "natural" process that took place only through matriarchal lineage, with females spending their lifetimes in the same troop and a few dominant males moving in and out as hierarchies shifted.

In the wild, a female baboon weans her baby at between 6 and 8 months, a process that begins with the mother holding the baby tightly against her body while foraging on three legs and ends with the infant foraging on its own. C.A.R.E.'s "unnatural" weaning process is more complex, beginning, for the first month or two with the infant spending 24 hours a day -- including time in the shower (and, yes, in case you're truly interested, on the toilet) -- tied around its human surrogate mother's waist in a shawl, or in her arms, where it is fed with bottles of baby formula. Since no lactating baboon mother with an infant of her own will take on one that is not hers, and a motherless infant might easily be killed by an adult male, the tiny infants require such human stand-ins. When Rita, the surrogate mother and the staff think the infant is ready, it is moved to the nursery with the other infants for several hours a day, returning to sleep with the mother at night. This phase slowly morphs into the next -- usually at around 2 months -- when the infant grows comfortable with spending the entire day in the nursery and only nights with its mother.

During the final phase, when the babies seem unhappiest, the infant continues to sleep in the surrogate mother's room at night, but in a small cage. This prepares it for its real "move" into post-infancy, when it will begin to sleep with the other infants -- and their baby bottles and stuffed animals -- in cages set up in Rita's bathroom in the main house, a stage that lasts about a year. Another four years will pass, roughly, before the baboon is ready to be released into the wild.