Do they shoot a lot of baboons over there?? Kinda like shooting a hairy midget????
There seemed to be no love lost for baboons when we were in RSA (the Karoo). Baboons, it turns out, have a well-deserved reputation for killing livestock for what sounded like pure blood lust.
I had never heard of an animal that would sequentially rip the stomachs out of lambs until that very scenario was described by one of our group's PH's (who was also a sheep rancher).
Dave described coming across a baboon that was seated near one of Dave's chicken coops. The baboon was absorbed in a behavior that involved ripping the feathers off live chickens until they died, then grabbing another one and repeating the process. Not eating them, just taking apparent delight in the process of tormenting them until they expired. There was a mess of dead chickens with their feathers ripped out and one crazy baboon when Dave came across the scene. Dave doesn't like baboons at all.
Also standard was the very firm advice that "you never let your dogs confront a baboon". Why? Apparently baboons have an exceptionally strong upper body and will tear the legs off of a dog before or after gutting the pooch (it turns out baboons are also very adept at using their fangs...)
So, there's no love lost for baboons where we were hunting.
Were a lot of them shot? No, but the invitation was there to shoot them on sight. I saw baboons at "shootable" distances (200-300+yards) on several occasions but wasn't inclined to shoot one 'till near the end of the hunt.
Neo ended up whacking one on the run (at a crazy distance) early on. Near the end of our hunt, on a day when I was hunting jackals and caracal, I unexpectedly found myself ~15 metres behind a baboon (a surreal experience) during an after-lunch walkabout on a mountain top. By the time I chambered a round in my Tikka 695 (.270 Win) the baboon, looking back over his shoulder with a hair-do looking straight out of "Planet of the Apes, scrambled back over the shear side of the mountain where he had been holed up earlier, hooting on and off during our lunch break.
Earlier that day I had finished off an old one that my PH whacked with his .300 Win Mag. (Yeah, they've got big nasty teeth.)
