When baboon captivity becomes ‘ethical’ modern conservation, something has gone terribly wrong

The argument is not about suffering

In their response to my recent Daily Maverick article, University of Cape Town researchers Justin O’Riain and Joselyn Mormile ask what value freedom has when it exposes baboons to suffering, injury and premature death.

It is a legitimate question, but it misrepresents my argument.

I have never suggested that freedom should be defended irrespective of suffering, nor that animal ethics operates independently of ecological evidence. My academic work concerns precisely the intersection of animal ethics, conservation science and the human-created conditions shaping wildlife lives.

The disagreement is whether human-induced suffering justifies permanently depriving wild animals of their freedom rather than fundamentally changing the conditions responsible for that suffering.

More importantly, what precedent does this establish?

If captivity becomes an acceptable response to dangers humans create, conservation risks becoming an exercise in confining wildlife rather than preserving the conditions necessary for animals to remain wild.

Whose ethics are we talking about?

O’Riain and Mormile challenge my suggestion that the Baboon Action Plan lacked ethical scrutiny, pointing to an expert review involving bioethics.

The documents underlying that review deserve closer examination.

The Joint Task Team’s August 2025 draft review response report identifies Dr Benjamin Allen, affiliated with Nelson Mandela University and Wildlife Management Sciences in Australia, as an expert in ethics, conservation management and human–wildlife conflict.

Allen’s published academic position is as revealing as it is disturbing.

In 2023, he led a paper in Science of the Total Environment titled Why humans kill animals and why we cannot avoid it. Among its co-authors was O’Riain himself. The paper argues that animal killing is an unavoidable feature of human participation in ecological systems and that ethical debate should shift away from whether animals should be killed towards when and how killing should occur.

Allen has also published research investigating lethal predator control, including the use of para-aminopropiophenone (Papp), a poison developed for controlling predators. This reveals a particular determining orientation: one in which lethal wildlife management is accepted as potentially necessary, with substantial attention directed towards its justification and implementation.

That position is open to serious philosophical challenge.

The fact that humans inevitably cause some animal deaths does neither establish that deliberate lethal management is ethically justified in any particular case, nor does reducing suffering during killing resolve the prior question of whether an animal should be killed at all.

These are distinct moral questions.

The Joint Task Team’s own review also reveals disagreement. One anonymous reviewer called for stronger ethical scrutiny and questioned the adequacy of consultation, while another supported lethal removal. The report anonymises individual responses, so these positions cannot be attributed to specific panellists.

Nevertheless, the disagreement is important.

An ethical review should not merely ask how an intervention can be justified. It must seriously examine whether the intervention is justified in the first place. A panel containing someone described as an ethicist does not automatically constitute comprehensive ethical examination. And when the same researchers involved in defending permanent captivity have previously collaborated on an academic defence of lethal wildlife management, the underlying ethical framework deserves explicit public scrutiny.

The problem of scientific authority

My published paper, Terms of conflict: The language of dominance and power at the human-wildlife interface, examines how conservation terminology frequently represents wildlife behaviour as problematic while treating human occupation and ecological disruption as normal.

This linguistic asymmetry has material consequences.

A baboon entering a house becomes a problem animal. Human settlement in baboon habitat becomes an established condition of management. The former demands intervention. The latter is rarely subjected to equivalent scrutiny.

O’Riain and Mormile acknowledge that humans have transformed the landscape. Yet their preferred solution requires the baboons to surrender their freedom. That is not simply a scientific conclusion. It reflects a particular distribution of moral responsibility. Science can establish behavioural patterns, ecological constraints and welfare risks. But it cannot independently determine how much liberty another sentient being should lose to accommodate human interests.

That judgment requires philosophy, ethics and law alongside conservation biology.

Safety is not the entirety of wellbeing

O’Riain and Mormile argue that captivity would reduce injuries, provide consistent nutrition and protect baboons from human violence. These benefits warrant consideration, but they do not establish superior overall wellbeing.

The internationally recognised Five Domains Model includes behavioural interactions and mental states alongside physical health and nutrition. For socially complex, cognitively sophisticated primates, opportunities for movement, exploration, environmental choice and meaningful social relationships are substantial welfare interests. An enclosure may reduce immediate dangers while imposing profound restrictions on other dimensions of life.

The authors accuse me of comparing captivity with an idealised wilderness.

I have done nothing of the sort.

The relevant comparison is between permanent captivity and feasible improvements to coexistence within an already modified landscape. Difficulties involving fencing, waste management and urban food attractants warrant rigorous evaluation. They do not, by themselves, establish the ethical necessity of imprisoning entire troops.

When victims pay for human violence

O’Riain and Mormile invoke the suffering of a baboon shot in the spine, paralysed and subsequently euthanised. It is a disturbing example of human cruelty, but its use as an argument for captivity reveals a fundamental problem.

A human shot the baboon. Yet the proposed solution is to confine the baboons.

Rather than treating human violence primarily as grounds for stronger enforcement and changes in human conduct, the animal’s suffering becomes justification for removing the animal’s freedom. This transfers the consequences of human wrongdoing onto those who suffer from it. Protection then becomes conditional on separation from human society rather than our willingness to change how that society behaves.

That is an ethical choice, not a scientific inevitability.

The dangerous precedent of captive conservation

This debate extends far beyond two Cape Peninsula troops.

Across southern Africa, elephants confront fenced reserve boundaries, predators encounter expanding settlements and primates adapt to landscapes transformed by urban development. Wild animals moving through fragmented habitats are routinely labelled troublesome, damage-causing or problematic.

If permanent confinement becomes acceptable whenever coexistence presents difficulties, where does that reasoning end? Should elephants whose movements bring them into conflict with settlements be permanently confined? Should predators be removed from landscapes where livestock losses occur? Should every baboon troop entering an urban area face captivity?

These questions expose the dangers of normalising confinement as a conservation response to human-created pressures. There is a profound difference between rescuing an individual animal incapable of surviving independently and converting an entire free-ranging social community into a captive population. The former may be ethically necessary. The latter demands an exceptionally high burden of justification.

Wildness is not simply the absence of human contact. It encompasses the capacity to exercise agency, navigate ecological relationships, maintain social bonds and pursue lives not comprehensively determined by human institutions. To preserve an animal's biological existence while extinguishing these possibilities is not necessarily to conserve its wild life.

Conservation cannot surrender its purpose

The baboon controversy exposes a deeper problem within conservation: the tendency to prioritise population management, human convenience and measurable physical welfare over the independent interests of individual wild animals.

Ethics must do more than refine the techniques through which animals are controlled, confined or killed. It must question the legitimacy of that control.

Before permanent removal proceeds, an independent multidisciplinary assessment should examine all reasonable coexistence alternatives, incorporating animal ethics, philosophy, ecology, veterinary science and law. The burden of justification must remain with those proposing irreversible confinement.

O’Riain and Mormile ask how much suffering should be tolerated in the name of freedom. I ask how much freedom must be sacrificed because humans refuse to address the conditions producing that suffering.

The central question is not whether a baboon might live longer behind a fence. Rather, it is whether extending life under permanent control adequately compensates for the loss of a wild existence, and whether society has exhausted its responsibilities before imposing that loss.

If our answer to the destruction of wildlife habitat is to imprison the surviving animals, conservation has ceased challenging the causes of ecological dispossession and begun accommodating them.

That is the dangerous precedent at stake in Cape Town. We cannot continue destroying the conditions necessary for wild animals to live freely and then congratulate ourselves for compassionately providing them with cages. DM