One of ICS’s contracted substitute teachers is an Australian fellow named Mat Pines.  He’s a soft-spoken young man who tutors high schoolers in the afternoon when he’s not called in to sub.  You wouldn’t guess it to look at him, but he just finished a five-year stint living in the wild with a troupe of Hamadryas baboons.

One recent Sunday afternoon in the ICS library, Mat introduced a screening of “Living with Baboons,” narrated by Sir David Attenborough.  The show is an installment of the BBC’s Natural World television series.  The episode documents Mat’s efforts to convince the Afar tribesmen living around Ethiopia’s Awash National Park that they can coexist with the threatened baboons, which the Afar perceive as a threat to their livestock.

The episode is supposed to air on Animal Planet in the US in September or October.  Here it is on YouTube: