Humans and Hyenas

Monster or Misunderstood

Keith Somerville

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367436414
• eBook ISBN: 9781000360561
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

Humans and Hyenas examines the origins and development of the relationship between the two to present an accurate and realistic picture of the hyena and its interactions with people. The hyena is one of the most maligned, misrepresented and defamed mammals. It is still, despite decades of research-led knowledge, seen as a skulking, cowardly scavenger rather than a successful hunter with complex family and communal systems.

Hyenas are portrayed as sex-shifting deviants, grave robbers and attackers of children in everything from African folk tales through Greek and Roman accounts of animal life, to Disney's The Lion King depicting hyenas with a lack of respect and disgust, despite the reality of their behaviour and social structures. Combining the personal, in-depth mining of scientific papers about the three main species and historical accounts, Keith Somerville delves into our relationship with hyenas from the earliest records from millennia ago, through the accounts by colonisers, to contemporary coexistence, where hyenas and humans are forced into ever closer proximity due to shrinking habitats and loss of prey. Are hyenas fated to retain their bad image or can their amazing ability to adapt to humans more successfully than lions and other predators lead to a shift in perspective?

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in the environmental sciences, conservation biology, and wildlife and conservation issues.

1

Dramatis Personae

The spotted, striped and brown hyenas

• Class Mammalia
• Order Carnivora
• Suborder Feliformia
• Family Hyaenidae
• Subfamily Hyaeninae
• Spotted Genus Crocuta Species Crocuta crocuta
• Striped Genus Hyaena Species Hyanea hyaenea
• Brown Genus Parahyanea Species Parahyanea brunnea

Brown, striped hyena and spotted hyenas belong to the subfamily Hyaeninae, a subfamily that includes all living and extinct bone-cracking hyenas.¹ Aardwolves are the only members of the Hyaenidae subfamily Protelinae and are insectivores. The hyenas are surprisingly varied in their ecologies and social behaviours² and are distributed across most of Africa (except the most arid areas of the Sahara, high mountains and dense Congo Basin and West African rainforest); the Middle East (from Turkey to southern Arabia); and West, Central and parts of South Asia. Population numbers are hard to assess and throughout, the estimates given are within broad ranges based on spoor, scat, camera trap and observational surveys. These all have a margin for error.³

The striped hyena is found across the hyena range, excepting the southern half of Africa. It is the only hyena found outside Africa. The IUCN Red List places it in Afghanistan; Algeria; Armenia; Azerbaijan; Burkina Faso; Cameroon; Chad; Djibouti; Egypt; Ethiopia; Georgia; India; Iran, Islamic Republic of; Iraq; Israel; Jordan; Kenya; Lebanon; Libya; Mali; Mauritania; Morocco; Nepal; Niger; Nigeria; Oman; Pakistan; Saudi Arabia; Senegal; Syria; Tajikistan; Tanzania; Tunisia; Turkey; Turkmenistan; Uganda; Uzbekistan; Western Sahara; Yemen; with a possible presence in Benin; Central African Republic; Eritrea; Guinea; Kuwait; Qatar; Somalia; Sudan; United Arab Emirates. It is listed as “near threatened”, with a population globally estimated at 5,000–9,999.⁴ It is very possible that the difficulty in counting striped hyenas accurately means the population could be larger, as some conservationists believe.⁵

Map 1.1 Striped hyena IUCN Red List

The spotted hyena is only found in Africa. The IUCN Red List records it in Angola; Benin; Botswana; Burkina Faso; Burundi; Cameroon; Central African Republic; Chad; Congo; Democratic Republic of Congo; Côte d’Ivoire; Djibouti; Equatorial Guinea; Eritrea; Eswatini; Ethiopia; Gambia; Ghana; Guinea; Guinea-Bissau; Kenya; Malawi; Mali; Mauritania; Mozambique; Namibia; Niger; Nigeria; Rwanda; Senegal; Sierra Leone; Somalia; South Africa; South Sudan; Sudan; Tanzania; Uganda; Zambia; Zimbabwe; and possibly Algeria and Togo. It is listed as of “least concern” but decreasing in numbers. A “tentative estimate of the total global population is between 27,000 and 47,000”. The largest known populations occur in the Serengeti ecosystem in Tanzania and Kenya (7,200–7,700 in the Tanzanian sector and 500–1,000 in the Kenyan sector); in Kenya’s Tsavo East and Tsavo West NPs (3903 +/- 514)⁶; and the Kruger NP in South Africa (1,300–3,900).⁷ Yirga et al.’s suggestion that there could be 28,620 spotted hyenas in Ethiopia’s Tigray province would make that the largest population and would require a recalculation of the overall spotted hyena population,⁸ but it remains to be verified.

The brown hyena is found in Angola; Botswana; Namibia; South Africa; and Zimbabwe; with possible presence in Eswatini (Swaziland) and Mozambique. It is listed as “near threatened”, with a population between 4,365 and 10,111. Botswana has the largest population at about 3,900 animals, followed by Namibia with between 566–2,440 and South Africa with 800–2.200; no reliable population size estimates are available for Zimbabwe, Angola, Mozambique or Eswatini.⁹

Striped hyena (Hyaena hyaena)

This hyena weighs between 26–34kg (females) and 26–41kg (males), and is 1.00–1.10m in length, 0.66–0.75m in height.¹⁰ It is dog-like, with a sloping back, black vertical stripes on a background of grey or beige, pointed muzzle and ears and a mane along its back.¹¹ It occurs in open habitat or light thorn bush country, avoiding altitudes above 2,500m and dense forest.¹² It favours rocky areas, ravines and hills, preferably with caves in which to rest during the day. Mainly nocturnal and shy of humans, it does nevertheless reside in some areas (Palestine/Israel, for example) close to human settlements.¹³ They generally occur at low densities.

Although the research has increased in recent years, with research on behavioural ecology by Wagner,¹⁴ on status and conservation in Lebanon by Abi-Said¹⁵ and in Rajasthan by Singh¹⁶ and a few earlier papers by Kruuk¹⁷ and Leakey et al.,¹⁸ it is comparatively little studied.¹⁹

Map 1.2 Spotted hyena IUCN Red List

Map 1.3 Brown hyena IUCN Red List

Diet

Striped hyenas have a diverse diet including carrion, medium and small vertebrates, invertebrates and fruits and vegetables (melons, dates and other fruits and vegetables matter), as well as utilising waste produced by humans.²⁰ They are capable of killing medium-sized ungulates and livestock.²¹ Kruuk said they were “inveterate scavengers of human waste” and that in the Serengeti, they fed on “domestic refuse such as fruits…bread, boiled potatoes and any animal offal such as bones, pieces of leather”.²² He also referred to reports that they had killed and eaten people.²³ Studies in Kenya, Israel and Lebanon document that they take human remains from graveyards.²⁴ Faecal analysis of their diet in Tanzania showed the following: zebra in 4% of samples; wildebeest 22%; kongoni 4%; topi 2%; Grant’s gazelle 24%; impala 2%; Thomson’s gazelle 42%; dik-dik 12%; hare 10%; lizard or snake 32%; birds 44%; vegetable matter 36% – most would have been scavenged but the smaller mammals, reptiles and birds may have been hunted.²⁵ Bhandari et al. examined scats in two lowland districts of Nepal. The analysis showed the following percentages – wild boar 26.2; hare 16.23; rhesus monkey 15.58; muntjac deer 11.03; langur monkey 8.44; domestic goat 5.15; domestic sheep 2.59; and dog 2.59.²⁶

Foraging and hunting

Striped hyenas are solitary foragers and don’t regularly feed in large groups.²⁷ The exceptions being where there are particularly rich food sources, including man-made feeding stations established to observe feeding behaviour, at which large groups may gather.²⁸ Although this does not alter the size of groups in which they live, it means they are less solitary than thought.²⁹ They are almost totally nocturnal in their foraging. The sub-species found in North Africa, India and Syria are slightly larger than the others and periodically hunt and kill larger mammals. Leakey believed that striped hyenas in Kenya were not successful hunters of large mammals,³⁰ and were inefficient hunters of smaller mammals like hare, porcupine and small rodents, reptiles, birds and insects.³¹

In its Middle Eastern and West Asian range, hyenas scavenge the remains of camels, wild goats, domestic sheep and goats and donkeys, with some hunting of domestic animals (including dogs) and small-to-medium-si...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• List of abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Dramatis Personae: The spotted, striped and brown hyenas
• 2. Humans and hyenas from the Pleistocene to the Holocene
• 3. Humans and hyenas in Africa to 1600CE
• 4. Humans and hyenas in West, Central and South Asia to 1600CE
• 5. Humans and hyenas from 1600CE to the end of the 19th century
• 6. Persecution increases under colonial rule
• 7. Contemporary Africa, West, Central and South Asia
• 8. Myths and representations from early humans to The Lion King
• Index