Action in response to emergency Ward 10 meeting held on 29th April 2024

Hi All
Here below is RERA’s measured response to the OM Pringle Bay baboon troop management plan any of us first heard of at the emergency ward meeting on 29 April. Notwithstanding our personal views, the Exco has decided to take a differentiated approach to that of REC in the interests of continuing to improve our relationship with the OM officials we depend on as a community.
You may disagree, and please do feel free, either way, to mail or DM me with your views. We take very seriously our duty to represent you first and then all of Rooiels and its fauna and flora as best we can.
All supporting information can be accessed via the RERA pages of the Rooiels website.
The minutes of our 2nd   Exco meeting, held in late April, just before the ward meeting, will be with you this week.
All the best
Tom
​Tom Baigrie
Chair
RERA Exco 2024
[email protected]
+44 7930572892

12 May 2024 email sent to the
Manager Environment Overstrand Municipality and the Ward 10 Councilor
cc: Chair Rooiels Conservancy, Chair Rooiels Boatclub, Chair Rooiels Outreach, RESA: Peter Koning, Mark Butler and Hilgard Muller

Dear Theresa and Liesl
 
We the Rooiels Ratepayers Association, write in response to the OM paper published at the Ward Meeting on 29th April 2024. Before writing we asked all in our village to give us their views and personally consulted the chairman of the Pringle Bay Ratepayers association to best understand theirs.
 
RERA is keen to ensure that our dialogue with OM is constructive and positive in all matters relating to our village. And in particular that our relationship with OM is such that we can be trusted with advance knowledge and input into any initiative that affects our village and Conservancy in any way. We would ask for your assurances in this regard and regret that you did not feel able to consult with us before this Emergency Ward Meeting. That meant that your referencing the Rooiels Conservancy as a potential new home for the Pringle Bay baboon troop caused shock and anxiety in our village.
 
We in Rooiels are deeply concerned at the impact your programme in Pringle Bay will have on the conservancy and the smallholdings in particular, and our members are monitoring any potential impact on the Rooiels troop and whether there is any increase in the current minimal human-baboon conflict seen in Rooiels.
 
As you know, the Rooiels troop causes far less human division and conflict than has happened in Pringle Bay. We believe that is because the vast majority of people in our village have adapted our human behaviour to ensure that the troop get minimal access to human food, bird seed etc.  Notwithstanding that, our village fynbos is a rich source of baboon food and so they are present daily amongst us. We try to minimise conflict by:
1. Baboon Information Officers, who we train and pay to who work during seasonal peak times in the CBD.
2. Supplying educational material and coaching to new residents
3. Supplying pamphlets and suitable signage to our businesses.
 
While failures and thus conflict happens, it is rare and we feel confident that the evidence is mounting that Rooiels is proving that the best way to manage baboons is to better manage the humans they inevitably interact with when we choose to live on their feeding grounds. We do acknowledge that this is much easier in our smaller community, than it is in much larger ones.
 
We have several times surveyed our village regarding baboons and consistently found overwhelming support for a tolerant and human-behaviour focused approach.  For our most recent survey please see here. This approach is of course the opposite of that taken by yourselves at the request of the Pringle Bay Ratepayers Association, and while we respect Pringle Bay’s right to determine the way in which they solve their problems, we agree with our Conservancy that the methods you are using are unlikely to work in the medium term, as baboons are cleverer than that (as your paper explicitly acknowledges), and that in the interim your methods are cruel and unnecessary. 
 
In Rooiels we understand that it is we who have imposed ourselves on the biosphere and we owe a duty of care to all those species and individual animals we have impacted. Trying to establish a form of apartheid where one species seeking natural food is kept out of a valuable source of same, or chased through it, is in our view, the wrong way to solve the issues caused by species interaction. 
 
Having said that, we as RERA will make no demands upon Pringle Bay or OM, but rather let your experiment play out. Our colleagues at the Rooiels Conservancy, and other groups whose primary purpose is the protection of fauna and flora, may well take a more confrontational approach, and many of our members will join them in that. We would urge you to take their concerns seriously. For our part we will focus on working closely with OM in maintaining and improving all aspects of life in Rooiels.
 
In that spirit of co-operation and good management, we would ask that you let us share in regular reports on the success or otherwise of the Pringle Bay programme and that these are, where possible, independently verified. In particular we view casualty and birth rate amongst the Pringle Bay troop as being a key indicator of the levels of distress being caused by your programme.
 
We look forward to your response and ongoing effort to do the right thing by all your ratepayers and the animals that have to live alongside us.
 
Yours faithfully
Tom Baigrie
Chair RERA Exco 2024