Rats!
They fought the dogs and killed the cats,
And bit the babies in the cradles,
And ate the cheeses out of the vats,
And licked the soup from the cooks' own ladles,
   
These lines are from the poem, The Pied Piper of Hamelin by Robert Browning. If the poet was around now, he would possibly have penned a similar verse on the criminal Baboons terrorising the people in the South African Cape peninsula.

Unlike the rats of Hamlin, these baboons don't live in the houses. They open the front doors and get in. And if the door is locked, they break in through the window.

Once inside a home, they head straight for the refrigerator. They open it, grab whatever food they can. Then they move around the house, messing up the furniture. Sometimes they even urinate and defecate all over the place. The baboons are also daring enough to open car doors and take away the supermarket buys!
And they are not one bit afraid of people. They move very fast and raid in gangs. So people are afraid to confront them. The desperate villagers are demanding that the authorities should do something and get the rogues out.
But if Baboons could speak, they would tell you their side of the story.

The source of the problem, they would tell you is that it is the humans who have encroached into their historic habitat. Trapped between the coastal cliffs to the south and near complete human habitation on the plains to the north, the 370 baboons of the cape peninsula have nowhere to go. Some baboons live in the region's Table Mountain National Park. But space here is quite limited. The park is a narrow, jagged strip of mountainous terrain broken and surrounded by villages.

If the baboons are such a nuisance, you might wonder why people don't shoot them. Thankfully they can't because it is illegal in South Africa to kill baboons. The coastal baboons are South Africa's last colony of baboons and as such the government has declared them a protected species. 

 But not all the people here want the baboons out. Many believe that the animals have a right to stay and should not be harmed. These people have formed organisations to monitor and train the animals to keep off homes.
Members of the 'friends of baboon' teams join the animals early in the morning and stay with them until nightfall. When the baboons move toward houses or the streets, they drive them away by making noises and waving arms and sticks. 

But lately the monkeys are getting to be more cunning.

Some of them rise early and go on their raids before the team members arrive! Sometimes they sneak down to villages at dusk after the team members have left.

Once the villagers caught a baboon and painted it White. Whoever did it thought this would scare them all off. But what happened was that the rest of the gang surrounded it and groomed it until all the paint was off!