In recent years, activists and concerned residents in the Cape Peninsula have sounded the alarm about the escalating problem of human-baboon conflict in the region. Now, legal action has been instituted against local authorities responsible for the implementation of baboon management strategies.

Animal rights activists and concerned residents from communities on the Cape Peninsula have approached the Western Cape High Court to hold authorities accountable for their failure to implement proposed baboon management strategies in the region.

The applicants include the Baboon Matters nonprofit organisation (NPO); Beauty Without Cruelty, an animal rights NPO; Jo-Anne Bosman, an animal activist in the Western Cape; and Ryno Engelbrecht, a concerned resident of Capri in Cape Town's Deep South. They say they have launched the legal action in response to the "prolonged, unresolved and rapidly escalating human-baboon conflict on the Cape Peninsula".

Jenni Trethowan, the founder of Baboon Matters, told Daily Maverick that there was a cyclical pattern in which authorities held public meetings, devised strategies to manage the baboon population and then failed to implement them.

"Our main aim is to get them to implement the strategies that they themselves came up with, agreed upon, researched and reported on over the past 23 years... The problem is that the authorities don't agree with each other on whose responsibility is whose and ... where the budget must come from. So, they don't implement the things that they know are the solutions," she said.

Among those named...