My monkeys are famous on the internet!

Okay not really. Not yet. There's only a few hundred views at time of this posting. But its TV! Real... British TV...

Another thing about this video is that its quite recent. Not so recent as Fred's untimely demise, as that baboon plays a major role in this video. Its quite a good video, too, comapred to the media I'm used to seeing surrounding these baboons. Bill Bailey doesn't make any judgements on what the baboons are doing, and he mostly chastises humans for being clearly dumb and not protecting their valuables. There are several minor errors, and more than a few leaps to conclusions, but that is The Science talking.

The Tokai troop in this video is my troop, though. You won't recognize the names because they have been changed to protect the innocent. Though one of these days I may reveal the unadulterated truth of these baboon tales. Dani's certainly grown into the hide and build of an alpha male, though.

There are some oddities (minor errors, perhaps, as I alluded to earlier), which I could go on about for pages, but I'll stick to some of the more interesting ones. Bailey implies that the Smitz baboons know that the whales are why the humans come to that area. I won't rule out the possibility that they might be doing this, but Occam's Razor suggest otherwise. Have a look at the terrain - its steep fynbos all around. That troop doesn't need to know about whales or the whale watching season, they only need to know that foolish humans with food tend to congregate along that coast line on a regular basis. Then they can peer down from where they might sleep on the outcroppings and see if the humans are lining up as easy pickings on any given day.

In Tokai, Whitey is far from the oldest female around. She wasn't even one of the females I included in the Old Ladies Club. The leg injury is not likely to be permanent. There is a Limper in the other troop, who I figured would recover, but simply never did, however, so Whitey might be stuck that way. Hard to say. As the film shows, and as I always say, being a female baboon is rough. Easy work for the filmmakers, on the other hand; there is a good chance that any day they were to come by, one of the big males would pick on one of the females. I did like the fact that Bailey acted properly confused as to what particular reason Dani had for chasing Berta on this particular day.

Even if you don't care for the narration, the footage is some of the best (and longest) you'll find anywhere. Definitely worth the watch. It would have been worth it just for that shot of Stettler, sitting in the forest. The old man always was my favorite.