So the moment I leave Kommetjie, there’s an outbreak of hostilities between the humans and the baboons. It’s almost as if I was the link keeping the two apart. Well, I’m the missing link now and they’re just going to have to fight it out among themselves. We are all monkeys, after all. The only difference is that we have money and guns. Normally we’d bribe them to leave the area but they don’t take cash so we have to shoot them. This offends the pacifists, who seem to think we should be nicer to them. And we would be nicer if they weren’t such hooligans.

I didn’t mind the baboons when I lived in this village with a rehab and a surfing problem. We had a bit of a rapport, in fact. When I walked over to my local pub, I’d often come across the Slangkop posse ferreting about in bins or grooming each other. I’d nod and greet them as I would anyone ambling around the neighbourhood enjoying their day.

Now all hell has broken loose. A protest a few nights ago ended with a woman and a baboon getting pepper-sprayed. As far as I know, the woman wasn’t with the baboon in a romantic way, although anything’s possible in the Deep South. She was a baboonist and her assailant was a humanist, although these are confusing non-scientific terms and I’d advise you not to use them in educated company.

The problem, apart from the fact that baboons are too thick to realise that scaring decent, God-fearing white folk and biting their dogs is no way to make friends, is that the City of Cape Town has given up. I can’t work out if they’ve given up on controlling the baboons or the people of Kommetjie, both of which are ungovernable in their own ways.

If you think the ANC, Cosatu and SA Communist Party is a useless alliance, you haven’t seen the City of Cape Town, CapeNature and SANParks getting together to “manage” the baboons on the peninsula. From rangers with paintball guns and bear bangers to electrified fences and moats filled with crocodiles, they have failed dismally.

When they are out of options, they turn to euthanising “rogue” individuals. A couple of weeks ago, the Cape Peninsula Baboon Management Joint Task Team, who seem to focus more on joints than management, put out a hit on Creamy, Jody and Junior, healthy adult males who had made the fatal mistake of behaving like baboons instead of people who go to the theatre on Friday nights.

I remember when William was a casualty of the alliance’s secret protocol to assassinate troublemakers. For months, William had been breaking into cars, terrorising defenceless old ladies and running a pyramid scheme that left widows and orphans penniless. He deserved to die. And even though witnesses to these crimes were reluctant to come forward, someone did see him enter a house through an open window, whereupon he proceeded to steal two (2) bananas and defecate on the Persian rug.

If people like William, Creamy, Jody, Junior and many others cannot learn to behave in a civilised manner, it is only right that lethal darts be fired into their hairy, disrespectful bottoms.

What we need are finishing schools for baboons. Once the juvenile delinquent stage is out of the way, they should be encouraged to attend classes taught by primatologists fluent in Chacma.

Graduates, however, will no longer be happy to lick ants off a stick and will begin trawling the suburbs looking for something prepared by Woolworths.

A lot of people, Christians mostly, don’t like to be reminded that we are descended from apes – especially not when the animal doing the reminding is standing in the kitchen with the fridge door open and one hand on its hip as if to say, “Can I help you?”

Then you get people like Jane and Peter of Constantia, home to a slightly better class of baboon. They wrote to a local paper: “We have lived in Constantia for 30 years …” they whinnied. “Our lifestyle has been severely compromised. A baboon ripping a child apart is a disaster waiting to happen.”

Please. That’s nothing. Wait until they learn to drive. They’ll be abducting our children and driving them up to the Cederberg where an alpha male called Fagin will teach them how to steal. The next time we see our kids, they’ll be loping about on all fours, playing with themselves, snatching food from the fridge and behaving abominably. Much like the teenagers do today, I suppose.

Jane and Peter had a solution. “The baboons must be removed from urban areas and put in reserves or they must be culled.” This is how the early American settlers dealt with the Cherokee and Sioux problem.

People who talk about “living under a baboon siege” and being “under threat of invasions” should be rounded up and shipped off to Gaza to see what it’s really like to be under siege.

As for their lifestyle being compromised, shame. Can’t have vulgar baboons frightening the polo ponies. Poor Jane and Peter. I say shoot the bastards. Be careful not to hit the baboons.

The traumatised couple refuse to believe that baboons raid the suburbs because urbanisation is encroaching on their natural habitat. Instead, they say it’s because the baboons are protected and no longer have natural predators. So they would prefer to see leopards introduced to Constantia? Sooner or later someone’s labradoodle or cockapoo will get torn to shreds. Then we’ll have to bring in the lions to control the leopards, the buffalo to control the lions, the elephants to control the buffalo, and the next thing you know, there’s nowhere to put the Range Rover because a herd of wildebeest has moved into the garage.

My friend Ted says the real solution lies in euthanising the alpha males in CapeNature and SANParks. Worth thinking about.