from the injuries caused by the leg-hold traps. It seemed immoral not to try. Chris did
not have a budget for this. We agreed that we would look for some seed money to start
a pilot live-trap project in Budongo sub-county. The condition, we all agreed, was that
any animal not constituting one of the species of officially declared vermin must be
released, and, most importantly, there must be no setting of leg-hold traps in villages
where live-traps were supplied, or the live-trap would be removed immediately.
Later in 2001 6 traps were constructed. Farmers were very enthusiastic indeed as they
found the traps did in fact catch baboons, which they killed. There was an added advant-
age: if a baboon was caught in a trap, the individuals in that troop avoided the area for
several weeks thus providing at least some temporary relief for the farmers. I should
perhaps explain that not only is it legal to kill baboons in Uganda (they are classified as
vermin) but people are extremely hostile to them and kill, maim and oppress them in
every conceivable way. People actually hate baboons and would wish every baboon
dead. The above points, often made to us at Budongo on visits to villages, were con-
firmed by a study of attitudes to live traps in the area surrounding Budongo Forest
(Seaboet al. 2002) This study was made independently of the BFP by a small team of
outsiders from Botswana and Eritrea as well as Uganda and it was thus of great interest
to us at BFP to find that our live-traps were well received.
The attitude to baboons described above is in contrast to the attitude to chimpanzees
which are traditionally tolerated even if they take food from people’s fields and gardens.
This positive attitude to chimpanzees is found today among older residents, some of
whom link them with their ancestors. New immigrants, coming into the area from far
and wide and from a great variety of different tribes and backgrounds, tend to be less
tolerant and often have no traditional respect for chimpanzees. This especially applies to
immigrants and locals who become sugar cane outgrowers; they are commercially
motivated and show little respect for chimpanzees if they come crop-raiding.
Some individuals in Uganda use chimpanzee body parts for medicinal purposes, but
they are in a minority. And even such people are less hostile to the small number of
chimpanzees that occasionally visit their fields and gardens in comparison with the open
hostility they show to the much larger numbers of baboons that inhabit the area and do
serious damage to crops and fruits. These attitudes to chimpanzees and baboons have
been studied by a number of our students (e.g. Kiwede 2001; Watkins 2001) and are
explored further in Chapter 10.
Release of chimpanzees from live-traps
We do not know how many times chimpanzees have been caught in live-traps and
released. In some cases, live-traps have caught mothers with infants; one of these releases
occurred at Nyabigoma village just to the south of Budongo forest (Fig. 9.13). These
photographs encapsulate the story of future chimpanzee survival and management in
Africa. Unless and until we develop ways of combining the food security of rural people
with the welfare and survival of chimpanzees, their numbers will slowly but inexorably
be reduced to nothing. I hope that, faced with similar problems, people in other parts of
188 The problem of snares