Baboon heaven: a South African Animal Rehabilitation Center gives an unpopular primate TLC and a chance to return to the wild

Natural History, Dec, 2007 by Michael C. Blumenthal

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

HOW DID I GET HERE, WITH DENNIS HUDDLED AGAINST MY CHEST, TORTILLA GROOMING THE HAIRS ON MY ARMS, SABRINA ON MY LEFT SHOULDER, AND MAGGIE ATOP MY HEAD, BEHAVING LIKE A HAIRDRESSER? AS I SMACK MY LIPS IN AN ATTEMPT TO MIMIC MY COMPANIONS' grunts and chatterings, Sinamo does a backward somersault between my legs, chasing after Cory and Jagger.

Friends and colleagues, perhaps secretly envious, have predicted that as a city boy and literature professor, I would feel out of place among these orphaned chacma baboons. Yet here I am, on the bank of the Olifants River in South Africa, yards away from wild crocodiles and elephants and hippos and the occasional lion. And it feels good--this grooming and chattering, these small baboon bodies hunkering against my chest.

THIS IS THE BABOONS' STORY, not a woman's, yet it must begin with a woman nonetheless--for it is with her that it all began. Rita Neumann was in love with animals as early as she can remember. Born in 1931 in Germany, she dreamed of becoming a veterinarian, but that path was closed to her because higher educational institutions granted preferential admission to soldiers returning from the Second World War. Rita went to work instead at Hamburg's renowned Hagenbeck Zoo and then, in 1953, emigrated to Johannesburg, South Africa. There she soon married her German fiance, Lothar Simon, and the couple had a daughter. In 1963 Rita bought a fifty-acre tract of bush wilderness near Phalaborwa, about 250 miles northeast of Johannesburg, that was destined to become her intimate link with the animal life she loved. But before that, in 1972, tragedy struck: Rita's husband and their seventeen-year-old daughter were both killed in a small-plane crash. Eight years after the accident, during her brief second marriage to Piet

Miljo, an Afrikaner, Rita made what might be regarded as the transforming acquaintance of her life. While traveling in northern Namibia, she encountered a baby female chacma baboon named Bobby. (In fact almost all anonymous baboons in South Africa were dubbed Bobby, after the Afrikaans name for the species, bobbejaan.) The animal had been plied with alcohol and abandoned in a trash bin at a military encampment. In defiance of the requirement for permits, Rita took Bobby home, and a bond between baboon and human was forged. In 1989, along with Bennett Serane, a like minded South African, Rita founded the Centre for Animal Rehabilitation and Education (C.A.R.E.), and her fifty acres of bushland became a refuge where injured wild animals--various birds, reptiles, and small mammals, initially--were treated and released.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

As increasing numbers of injured or abused chacma baboons, mostly orphaned babies, were brought in, the center began to specialize. Agricultural lands had encroached on the baboons' natural habitat, and wherever crops were threatened, farmers had the right to shoot the offending "vermin." Poaching, poisoning, illegal trade in pets and experimental animals, as well as environmental hazards (natural or otherwise), also left behind baboons in need of C.A.R.E.

"You know, they are the last creatures under the sun that nobody cares about," Rita says. "When I first started, everybody said to me, 'With all that energy you've got, why don't you look after rhinos?'--or cheetahs, or whatever else it was they cared about. And I answered, 'Because these guys need me.'"

THESE GUYS DO NEED HER, as I quickly find out when I arrive in May (South African autumn) to serve as a C.A.R.E. volunteer for three weeks. At the Phalaborwa airport I am picked up by the Centre's manager, thirty-eight-year-old Lee Dekker, a cheerful woman who exudes an air of commitment and competence. Normally she would be carrying an infant baboon in a shawl tied around her waist, but today the only baboon she's wearing is the one imprinted on her T-shirt. Since she has to stop in town to do some food shopping, she's left the baby she's foster-mothering, Suzie, behind.

[ILLUSTRATIONS OMITTED]

"The situation for wildlife in Africa is essentially hopeless," Lee tells me en route, "but we keep trying." Nearing the Centre, we drive along the crocodile- and hippo-filled Olifants River--a tributary of the "great grey-green, greasy" Limpopo, of Rudyard Kipling fame, where the Elephant's Child of the Just So Stories got his nose stretched into a trunk by a crocodile. I see a memorial wreath along the water's edge. "Don't ever walk along the river bank by yourself at night," Lee warns me, "and, for God's sake, don't ever go swimming in it. We don't want to have to put one of these up for you."

How I got to C.A.R.E., like so many of the volunteers, is by watching the Animal Planet network--to be precise, a show called "Growing Up Baboon," featuring the work of Rita Miljo and her staff. Another volunteer, Kim Solbakk, a former real estate investment manager from California making her fourth visit in less than two years, echoes my own sentiments: "I had always been interested in primates," she says, "and I wanted to do something hands-on."