If Herter (or whoever this is) shot 35 baboons in a day with a bow, my hat's off to him. That'd be a really good score with a rifle! Herter wasn't known for modesty or understatements...

Seriously, ad hyperbole aside, baboons are alert and post sentries. They can count to at least four and if riflemen are needing to thin out their numbers to save crops or to prevent attacks on native women, four or five riflemen can enter a patch of woods and leave one as the others leave in sight of the baboons. The hidden man can then often get in a few shots as the baboons converge on the area where the rifleman is hidden.

Baboons definitely distinguish between native women and warriors with spears and often attack the latter and steal crops from them. One baboon that I read about waylaid stragglers and travellers and ripped out their guts, leaving them to die by the road. Another turned out man-eater, although that seems to have been an isolated case, as with elephants that have eaten humans. Insofar as I know, the few elephant cases were zoo-involved and may have been deranged individuals.

The leopard is the most succcessful predator on baboons, but if they see one in time, the male baboons will usually drive him off. Leopards have been preying on our kind and similar species for eons. There is a well known fossil leopard skull whose teeth exactly fit into the holes in the skull of an australopitihicine found in its den. That takes us back maybe three million years.

Seriously, if that archer did kill that many baboons with a bow, he must be a remarkable hunter, with good concealment skills. Might be interesting to try that with a .44 Magnum revolver. But what if several big males charged, let alone a whole troop? Have you ever seen the teeth on a big male baboon? If a leopard respects what they can do, I certainly intend to learn from his attitude. The baboon in the photo is not especially huge.

Did Herter say where he killed those baboons? That looks sort of like a Gelada baboon in the poor photo angle. They live north of where the more familiar Olive and Chacma baboons do. (From Kenya and nearby to the Republic of South Africa, in the case of the last.)

I took a class in Primate Behavior in college. It was a graduate level course for zoology and biology specialists, but they let two of us undergrads in to have the minimum number of students to teach the class. There was a teacher in charge, but she oversaw us each teaching two classes, for which we had to do considerable preparation. I taught the classes on ringtailed lemurs and on baboons. Mainly on Olives and Chacmas, because my non- textbook research was largely centered on South African accounts of them from a hunter's or farmer's view or that of a early reseacher who was an Afrikaaner who had retreated to the bush after the Second Boer War to let his soul find peace in solitude, I guess. BTW, he carried a 7.63mm Mauser pistol like Churchill's famous gun. He didn't trust baboons although he got to know some quite well. But I don't recall that he had to shoot any.

Anyway, I find baboons to be fascinating, but I realize that they are pests and dangerous ones, at that. You could make a pretty good case that they are sort of like coyotes in that regard. And they're pretty smart, if not as much so as chimps, which have over 99% of our own DNA! I wrote a fan fiction about a now defunct TV show which had a group of renegade chimps that had learned to use fossil-era hand axes to smash open people's heads, leading local natives to think this was the work of the mythical (?) Nandi bear. That was a stretch, but I wouldn't be amazed if baboons could learn to do that, too, especially if they saw a chimp using a tool or weapon in a similar manner. But their teeth alone are fearsome weapons.

Did any of you see a movie called, "Sands of the Kalahari", starring Stuart Whitman as a Weatherby-carrying fellow who ran afoul of some Chacma baboons after a plane crash? Pretty good flick. Don't know if it's made its way to a DVD. It sort of did for baboons what, "Jaws" did for sharks. I wish that it had been more popular in theaters.