Misguided love for animals

Every now and then I am inclined towards a temper tantrum, usually brought on by an over-indulgence of chocolate or some other diet-induced aberration to my blood sugar which seems to be as temperamental as a touchy tennis player at times.  And every year at Lent, I vow and declare to try to last 40 days and 40 nights without disturbing my inner and outer calm.

This year, however, a troop of local baboons decided to put me to the test. They descended on my home, looking for anything edible. This involved scrambling on to my roof and destroying drainpipes along the way.

These are not ordinary baboons, but  very clever ones. They have learnt to open windows and doors and within a week of the neighbourhood being supplied with “baboon-proof” wheelie bins for their garbage, the crafty animals had worked out how the dual locking mechanisms worked and continued with abandon their practice of littering the suburb with enough refuse to get us declared an official United Nations health hazard zone.

I have tried reasoning with them, pleading with them, throwing old shoes at them, hurling abuse and epithets at them, hosing them down with water and even throwing the odd upturned wheelie bin at them. But to no avail.

It has become a major problem, brought about mainly by some local residents actually feeding them in complete contravention of the wise advice of wild-life experts.

It is a problem for which the solution is extremely complex. After all, the baboons are just doing what comes naturally to them. On the other hand, they have caused thousands of rands worth of damage when they’ve managed to get into houses. I have also seen a dozen baboons in a neighbour’s home with two of them having cornered three young children — barking and baring their teeth at the kids. That’s three children who were so traumatised the parents had to move out of the area.

Man’s interaction and attitude towards animals has always intrigued me, particularly when human beings assume to know what is good for animals and what is not.

For example, early last year a large pod of whales beached themselves on the white sands of Kommetjie on the Western Cape’s southern peninsula.

People rushed to the beach and immediately started trying to push the whales back into the sea and when the whales kept coming back and beaching themselves again, they poured water over them and gave them hugs. Then the experts arrived and said this was all very noble, but there was a reason the whales were beaching themselves, and with the best will in the world, trying to push them back into the sea and hugging them was causing them more trauma and distress than if nature was simply allowed to take its course.

So the experts took out their guns and started “humanely euthanasing” the whales by pumping them full of bullets while at the same time trying to beat back the local population who were throwing themselves into the line of fire.

A few days later a sizeable crowd gathered on Kommetjie beach at dawn to conduct a candle-lit memorial service for the whales.

At that very moment, I suspect, nobody in the entire Western Cape had taken the slightest bit of notice of a whole bunch of kids that had died of starvation, been raped, suffered child abuse or been bashed in a drunken stupor just a few kilometres away. But that’s another story for another time.

The point I’m trying to make is that this sad event showed that no one really knew for sure just why whales become so suicidal. Noone could say with certainty whether for some reason the whales wanted to die, or whether they really appreciated being saved; whether they took comfort from human beings hugging them or whether this scared the daylights out them.

Shortly after that, a local baboon called Eric was bitten by some dogs, which raised more of an outcry from the local population than when a child was bitten by a baboon some years ago.

Anyway, while Eric was recuperating in a local veterinary hospital ward in the sunshine overlooking False Bay, he was inundated with gifts of fruit, especially imported bananas. A kindly old lady of about 80 baked Eric a carrot cake. For the next two weeks the popular sentiment was that the old lady ought to be lynched, driven out of town and maybe even executed — because carrot cakes were bad for baboons!

I believe quite sincerely in our God-given responsibility to love all creatures, but I’m am a little concerned that quite often we humans tend to hurt some creatures quite badly with an over-abundance of misguided love.