Episode Information

In a remote location in South Africa a strange old German woman is living with over 500 baboons. Her name is Rita Miljo and she has saved every one of them. Baboons in South Africa are often regarded as vermin, animals to be shot at rather than saved. But not in Rita’s eyes. It all started with one female baboon called Bobby, who still lives with Rita today. Bobby inspired her to set up the nation’s only dedicated baboon rehabilitation facility, called CARE. Here, something remarkable takes place; Rita moulds her orphan baboons into troops and releases them into the wild, something previously thought impossible. Temperamental, acerbic and sometimes irrational, she is not an easy person to like. But scratch a little deeper and you find a complex, compassionate woman who self-taught has become the world expert on baboon rehabilitation. But when disaster strikes, will her legacy survive? Lady Baboon tells the story of a remarkable conservationist ready to lay it all on the line for the animals she loves, shaping the future of a species she calls “nature’s unwanted little people’.