Some very nice photos and stories about this animals. Thank you for the sharing.
I know a PH who charged baboons, just because he was scaried to see people who wanted to hunt only this animal, thus he would not get a lot of money at the end of the safari. But when he knew me, he told me to shoot them on sight for free !
Another PH told me to kill all of them. He told me he only charged $100 for the hunter who wants to make a full body mount, because it's a lot of work to skin such animal, and his worker hated to do it.
Once, I went into his farm to hunt mainly baboons. He told me he had a tamed leopard in the past and he had kept this animal a long time. He shot plenty of baboons to feed it and he hated these monkeys. At the end of the trip, he laughed and said : " Baboons are probably thinking there is a new leopard to feed in the cage ! ". For sure, we were behind them quite a lot during that stay, and several of them died !
When I hunted in the Caprivi the second time, there was only 5 baboons on quota in that conservancy, and because I was the last client of the season, I shot the 2 last baboons that remain on the permit.
Baboons were everywhere and not very wild as long as we stayed in the car. The tracker and the ranger didn't like them at all and at the end of the trip, we saw a big male that caught a baby warthog while we were driving around.
Both shouted to stop the car and one told me to shoot that "f*cker", but no quota left so I didn't even rise my rifle.
So they ran toward the baboon and I did the same. The animal left his pray and it ran away in the plain, but not so fast. If I was allowed to shoot it, I think its chance were very low ! But the baby warthog was already dead.
I started to speak with the ranger who was pretty upset against all these baboons. Then, I told him for joking to ask some own use permits for the next season, and to justify it, I said baboons will be useful to feed dogs from the village close by. And he replied me : "It is probably what I will do...we have far too much of them ! " But I don't know if some own use baboon permits were issued after that trip ?
Many people who hunted in the Western africa told me that natives loves to eat baboons, but in Namibia, they mainly refused to eat this animal. I joked many times with trackers or workers, but whatever their tribe : Damara, Bushman, Kavango, Herero, Tswana...they all refused to eat baboons.
The only people I met, and who eat baboons, were workers coming from Angola and known as "Wambo". These people works very often as woodcutter in farms and they are hard workers.
In my family, I had a great uncle in law who was teacher, and his sister (who was also teacher) worked a bit in the Dahomey (Benin). In the 50's, almost everything was possible, and she brought back to her country a young baby baboon named "Boubou". But with time, the animal who was a male became naughty and agressive, and they almost wanted to kill it for safety reason. But a great-grand-mother to me, and who lived in the south wanted the animal. She used to live in a big open area with many olive trees all around and no neighbours. So the animal was free to roam in the countryside, but definitely not a good animal to have because of its behaviour. It could be very agressive ! The animal died because he ate washing powder.
About taxidermy, I have only kept the skull of my first one. First, I wanted to make a full body mount, but it was very expensive and I gave up.
I have seen many full body mounts but most of them were average, or even pretty bad. Like cats, it's difficult to give them "a new life". This one in Africa was not so good from my liking.
