Woman attacked by loose one-armed baboon in Ontario, and the push for laws to change

An Ontario town is scrambling to write — and rewrite — bylaws after a one-armed baboon got loose and attacked a woman in the community.

The melee started when the baboon — named Mark — escaped from a home in Latchford, Ont., roughly 128 km northeast of Sudbury, last month.

Latchford Mayor Sharon Gadoury-East says Mark ran across a highway before attacking and biting a woman in her 40s who had been in a parking lot on her way to a doctor’s appointment.

“She tried to get into her vehicle, but it got a hold of her,” Gadoury-East told Global News this week.

“They had to put her on antibiotics and stuff like that for a 14-day treatment because they have no idea what the baboon has, right?

“When I talked to her, she was very much terrified.”

Gadoury-East says she has kept in touch with the victim, who was bitten in the leg, and reports she is recovering well.

Mark was eventually captured and returned to his owner, the mayor said.

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Gadoury-East says she’s not entirely sure why the owners have a primate, and doesn’t know what happened to his arm. She said the baboon’s owners brought Mark with them when they moved to town more than a decade ago.

But the mayor says she knows all too well why council hasn’t been able to order the owners to stop keeping a baboon in their backyard.

The problem lies, she says, in the fact the town didn’t have a bylaw banning exotic animal ownership on the books when the owners arrived.

While the town council’s quickly passed a bylaw after they moved in, Gadoury-East says Mark’s owners have been grandfathered in, meaning while they can’t bring another exotic animal into their home, their existing baboon is technically legal.

Gadoury-East says it’s the first time she knows of that Mark has attacked anyone.

She says the incident has led council to once again have to quickly write a new bylaw.

When police were called in to help, she says she learned there wasn’t much that could be done because the town’s animal bylaw only addressed bites from cats and dogs.

“Because it was a primate, there was nothing they could do,” Gadoury-East explained, adding the bylaw now includes exotic animal bites.

Global News reached out to local OPP but didn’t hear back by Wednesday afternoon.

While the province does have an act covering exotic wildlife in captivity, Gadoury-East says it lacks teeth and ultimately leaves municipalities like Latchford, which has a population of just over 300, on the hook for enforcement.

“Even if we’re making our bylaws, we can’t afford to police them,” she said.

“That’s the problem. Because even if I had to take those animals away, there’s no place that can take them.”

The ordeal has motivated Gadoury-East to start warning neighbouring municipalities about the risk they may also face.

“I think it was a real eye-opener for a lot of them,” she said of meetings she’s had since the attack.

“I did have some of the mayors come and talk to me and said, you know, ‘I never would have thought of anything like that.’

“I said the same thing. I never in my wildest dreams thought I would be fighting for something like this.”