Here, too, I drew upon my years of figuring out what made baboons tick, and part of my strategy involved differences between the sexes. Male and female baboons look quite different. Males can be twice as large as females and have special characteristics such as huge canine teeth, a long muzzle to house them and a mantle of hair around the shoulders. This is part of the anatomy of aggression that makes males formidable adversaries whether competing with each other for females or confronting predators, which they sometimes do. More importantly, males and females have different emotional attachments to the group and I played these off against each other in the design of my strategy.
Females are conservative.
If I released them first, they would settle in, get attached to the location and not want to wander far. When the males were released, female conservatism should put a brake on the males' greater tendency to wander off, including to places where they were not wanted. My responsibilities ended once the baboons were free. Then they would have to fend for themselves. This included figuring out what to eat.