Baboons!!??!?
Do you know how to tell a bonobo from a baboon?
A bonobo won't pull off your arm if you irritate it. It will just make sweet love to you.
More info...
For a baboon the uppercrust always eats first. The lower you are in the troop pecking order, the later you eat. So if you actually feed a baboon, you are unintentionally relegating yourself to the lowest level in the primate hierarchy. As the years have passed, the baboons have come to expect handouts as their rightful due and can become quite irritated when they are not forthcoming.
But baboons believing tourists are their personal valets is not the real problem. What is the problem is the baboons carry this attitude with them as they wander away from the national parks and into areas where modern agriculture and livestock breeding are replacing the traditional nomadic and pastoral lifestyles. There the baboons' idea that the food is being raised for their own personal benefit does not sit very well with the local farmers and herders trying to make a living.
Incidents of man versus baboon are regularly reported in the press. In some regions, baboons are reported to ransack homes and snatch chickens, goats, and other small livestock. The tried and true method for handling such intrusions, that is, making noise and shooing the interlopers away, isn't always best for dealing with baboons. Unlike most animals, baboons are quite capable of learning from their human neighbors and have no hesitation to responding in kind.
A young man who learned this the hard way was John Oluka of Uganda. When he saw a baboon in the family garden, he picked up a stick and started to drive the animal away. Instead of scampering off, the animal turned the tables on John, grabbed the stick and began to flog him as a number of incredulous villagers looked on.
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