Baboons Like Pinot Noir, I Like Baboons

Here is of those moments when the internet shows you that there are other people who pretty much know exactly how your dumb brain operates, either because their brains operate the same dumb way, or, more frighteningly, because their brains are smarter and they’re hoping to somehow profit off this fact. Even worse, they work faster than you: I read a story at Discovery this morning about how South African wineries have been having a problem with baboons sneaking into their vineyards and eating the grapes.

The baboons are clever; they swing onto private property from trees, tunnel under barriers and test electric fences for weak spots. They prefer the sweet pinot noir grapes to merlot or cabernet sauvignon. “Sometimes the baboons even get an alcohol kick,” it said, “by feasting on discarded grape skins that have fermented in the sun. After gobbling up the skins, the animals stumble around before sleeping it off in a shady spot.”

Well, there’s something I’d like to watch, I thought, because I am simple-minded and easily amused. Drunk baboons! Other people might like to watch that too! So I go on YouTube and type in “drunk baboons,” to see if I can find some amusing footage. There’s nothing much good: lots of video of drunk people behaving in ways that make other people say they’re like baboons

. And one video, seemingly taken from a 1970 nature documentary about animals in the savanna eating fermented fruit from the marula tree, shows drunk animals acting funny with a soundtrack that sounds like it’s from an old Hanna-Barbera cartoon. Scooby-Doo maybe. But nothing specific enough to baboons and wine.

So I type that in, “baboons wine,” and immediately find the video above, which doesn’t really show drunk baboons but is instead a montage of pictures of baboons at South African wineries apparently produced, sort of as a commercial, by the Nederberg winery? It was put up just yesterday by someone called GoldensGirl1, includes the photo that runs with the Discovery story, and loosely paraphrases that story in its accompanying informational text. It seems as if it were made just for some baboon-happy doofus, just like myself. Someone GoldensGirl1 would know would be searching YouTube soon after reading the Discovery story. Someone who then might post the video on a blog. Am I that transparent? Yes. Yes, I am. And they used Toto’s “Africa” as a soundtrack. So, there you go.