The Loss of 12

I woke this morning to hear the news that 12 Guinea baboons had been shot at Tiergarten Nürnberg Zoo in Germany. The animals were killed because the troop had grown too large for the enclosure and their caretakers argued that it was their only option. Each of the baboons were put into a crate and shot. In this brief post I touch on some of the interconnections between humans, baboons, and zoos which offer moments for us to pause and think about what role zoos play in our conceptions of human-animal relations.

Humans, baboons, and zoos

In preparation for an upcoming episode on The Animal Turn, I have just finished reading The Lion’s Historian, a brilliant book by Sandra Swart that traces the trajectories of animals’ histories in South Africa. She discusses the myths around lions, the extinction of the quagga, and the making of police dogs. In her final chapter, she discusses baboons and the long entanglement of human-baboon relations.

Swart notes the tightly knit relations of humans and baboons in southern Africa. How indigenous Africans admired baboons and learnt from their usage of plants, how humans have historically appreciated the sentry capacities of baboons, and how the development of agriculture and colonization saw the animals increasingly framed as pests and vermin. Another part of this history is how baboons were positioned within ideas of social Darwinism, as a missing link between animals and humans in the supposed Great Chain of Being. This understanding not only meant that baboons were used as metaphors for racist rhetoric in South Africa, but they were also traded for display in zoos.    

Keeping baboons in zoos is a tricky business. Swart explains how in the 1920s London Zoo created Monkey Hill, an enclosure designed to allow spectators the opportunity to observe baboon antics.  The zoo ordered hundreds of male hamadryas baboons to give spectators the opportunity to see the apes. But there was a mistake.  Some of the baboons who arrived were female. What ensued, to use Swart’s words, was a “baboon bloodbath.” She continues:

“The sex imbalance and the confined space almost immediately prompted a massacre. Caught in a literal tug of war between the larger males, most of the females were killed in the first few months. Even then, the males fought over their corpses. The brutality frightened even the zookeepers, who sometimes had to wait days before bolting into no man’s land to recover the bodies. But rather than remove the few surviving females, the zoo thought they could buy peace by adding more females. So, the war broke out again and the death continued, most by shockingly brutal means. By 1931, two-thirds of all the males and more than ninety percent of the females that had been brought to Monkey Hill had died. The zoo authorities eventually removed the surviving females. As the violence waned, so did the public’s interest in the exhibit” (Swart, 2023: 281)

Observations of these violent affairs shaped narratives about baboons and about humans. Like the analyses of captive wolves shaped ideas of supposedly alpha males, so too did observations of baboons fuel the narrative that primates are fundamentally violent. But primatologists like Jane Goodhall and Dian Fossey were instrumental in showing that what we observe in zoos is not ‘natural’ and that the dominance paradigm is flawed because, when left to themselves in their own habitats, apes show a great deal flexible and collaborative behavior. In zoos, social relations are pressured, pushed, and intense because the animals lack autonomy and space to express themselves in these ways.

Baboons at Monkey Hill in London Zoo (source: Meister Drucke)

But the fear of baboon violence has a long shadow, and it is used to maintain projects such as the one at Nürnberg Zoo. And this brings us to thinking about what zoos, and related establishments like aquariums, do. Zoos create opportunities to turn animals into spectacles, to research them, to sell them, and to kill them. Zoos kill animals. I have spoken about Marius the giraffe many times on the show, a giraffe who was killed because his genetics were no longer valued and who was then publicly dissected before being fed to lions. Stories such as Marius and the Baboons draw attention to the absurdity of zoos as places of care. Many animals die at zoos. Between 3,000-5,000 “surplus” animals are killed in zoos in Europe each year. Working with the lower estimate that is at least 30,000 animals a decade.

Activists in Nürnberg protested the killing of the baboons and have lamented the logics used by the zoo to do so. While zoo management says that they still have three too many baboons for the enclosure, they will leave the numbers as is. Two important words are missing, they will leave the numbers as is for now. Before killing the female baboons, zoo authorities checked if any of them were pregnant. There have been concerns over the size of the troop for years and activists have criticized the poor management of baboon breeding at the facility.  If the animals are having sex, then they will have babies, and the troop will continue to grow, once again becoming too large for the enclosure and prompting more death. Zoo management says it has tried to use contraception on the baboons but with little effect.

It is important to dwell on the reproduction of animals in zoos. Reproduction and breeding programs point to another significant way in which the lives and bodies of animals are controlled in these spaces. Zoos are often touted as important sites of conservation because they are said to safeguard against the loss of biodiversity and the extinction of species. To do this, some zoos still capture wild animals, but most rely on captive breeding programs. Breeding animals and trading their genetic materials are central to the business models of zoos.  Finding the exact figures for how much money specific zoos make, or even how much revenue is generated from a nation’s zoos, is difficult. Nonetheless, it is projected that zoos and aquariums in Europe will make at least US$6.66bn in 2025 rising to US$7.02bn by 2030. The historical framing of zoos as places of education and conservation is not entirely transparent about zoos economic objectives.

Guinea baboons

News articles covering the killing of the baboons in Germany have tended to follow the same structure. They explain how the troop grew too large, how the zoo closed when the animals were killed, and how activists have responded through protest. Very few of these articles have given details about the animals themselves.

Guinea baboons (Source: New England Primate Conservancy)

Guinea baboons, as their name suggests, are native to West Africa. They are found in forested and grassland habitats, but their numbers are declining due to habitat loss and being persecuted by humans as pests. That their numbers are in decline in West Africa and they are being killed in Europe points to some of the disconnect found within conservation strategies. As Daniel Ramp noted when he was on the show, who is included as a protected species in the red list is also shaped by politics and geography. It is common for animals who are endangered in one part of the world, to be killed in another.

Guinea baboons can live for anywhere between 35-45 years of age and form troops of between 40-100 individuals. They engage in sexual activities year-round and show polygynous and polygynandrous behavior. Females, in particular, enjoy socializing with one another and they care for their young for at least eight months after birth. They are highly social and engage in a range of complex communication strategies:

“They live in intricate, male-dominated, multi-faceted social groups. Their relationships are complex, but also very accepting and often promote positive social engagement. Their multi-level, fission-fusion social structure—in which groups join together or break apart based on the groups’ needs and activities—includes stable bonds between males and females as well as a high degree of male‐male cooperation and tolerance. Within this social structure, male Guinea baboons showed far less rivalry between and among other males, regardless of relatedness, as well as less aggression towards females than some other baboon species” (New England Primate Conservancy)

These details give us some insight into Guines baboons as a species but not so much about the specific individuals who were killed. We only know that they were not pregnant and they were not currently being used in experiments. The complexity of who they were and the implications of their loss for those who remain in the enclosure are opaque.  

Who were the 12 baboons who were killed? Whose sisters were they and who did they have close relationships with? What has been the response of the remaining baboons? Have they shown distress at the sudden disappearance of their kin?

To come back to Swart and the work of many animal historians and ethologists, what is lost when you kill animals is not only a matter of numbers. You have lost a series of connections, relations, and cultures. This should perhaps prompt us to question what we want from zoos as spaces and whether they work to sustain the kind of multispecies relations we need to create a more just world.