Striped hyena

• 1. Introduction

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  The striped hyena, Hyaena hyaena, owns a bite strong enough to splinter the thigh bone of a camel. It is also the smallest of the bone-cracking hyenas, and it is remarkably shy. Its range stretches across North and East Africa, the Middle East, the Caucasus, Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent. It spends nearly all of its active life in the dark. Across those regions, people have called it a coward, a vampire and an incarnation of jinn. Others have treated its teeth, hair and fat as medicine and charms. How did a modest scavenger end up with such a reputation? What does it actually do all night? And how many of these animals are left?

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• 2. Ancient Roots

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  Striped hyena fossils are common in Africa, and the oldest records reach back to the Early Pleistocene. The species may descend from Hyaenictitherium namaquensis, an animal of Pliocene Africa. The fossil record hints at when the hyena left home. No striped hyena fossils have turned up around the Mediterranean region. That absence suggests the species reached Eurasia late. It probably spread beyond Africa only after spotted hyenas had been wiped out in Asia at the end of the last glacial period.

  Europe still hosted the striped hyena for a time during the Pleistocene. It was especially widespread in France and Germany. Its remains are also known from Montmaurin, from Hollabrunn in Austria, from the Furninha Cave in Portugal and from the Genista Caves in Gibraltar. The European form looked much like modern animals but was larger, comparable in size to a brown hyena.

  That ancient giant is gone. Its living relative keeps a more old-fashioned design, with primitive features resembling those of viverrids, which larger hyenas have lost.

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• 3. Body and Coat

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  An adult striped hyena weighs between 22 and 55 kilograms and averages about 35. Its body measures 85 to 130 centimetres, with a tail adding another 25 to 40. The shoulder stands 60 to 80 centimetres high. The proportions look strange. A heavy, short torso rides on long, thin legs, and the hind legs are much shorter than the forelimbs, so the back slopes downward. The neck is thick and nearly immobile. The head is massive with a short face, small eyes and very large, pointed ears set high. Smell is acute, but eyesight and hearing are weak.

  Beneath the skin, the skull is typical of the genus, with a very high sagittal crest and an inflated frontal bone. It is smaller and less massive than the skull of a brown or spotted hyena. Even so, its shape is built to anchor exceptionally strong jaw muscles. The teeth are smaller overall than a spotted hyena's, yet the upper molar is far larger.

  The male has a large pouch of bare skin at the anal opening, fed by big glands. The anus can be everted up to 5 centimetres, which happens during social encounters and mating. When attacked, the hyena everts its rectum and sprays a pungent liquid.

  The coat is the animal's showpiece. A mane of tough, long hairs runs along the back from the occiput to the base of the tail. In winter the coat is a dirty brownish grey, dense and soft, with good underfur. In summer it turns shorter and coarser and loses the underfur, though the mane stays large. Mane hairs are pale at the base and black or dark brown at the tips. A black spot marks the front of the neck, set apart from the chin by a lighter zone. Small dark spots and cross stripes cover the forelegs, and four faint vertical stripes run along the flanks. The thighs carry three or four dark bands, and the tail ends in black over white underfur.

  No subspecies have been recognised as of 2005, but the animal varies from place to place. Arabian hyenas have a blackish mane whose middle hairs reach 20 centimetres, over a grey to whitish grey body. In Israel, the crest is a mix of grey and black. The largest hyenas live in the Middle East, Asia Minor, Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent. Those of East Africa and Arabia are smaller.

  The mane is more than decoration. When two striped hyenas fight, they bite at the throat and legs but carefully avoid it.

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• 4. Night Life

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  The striped hyena leaves its den only when total darkness falls and hurries back before sunrise. It usually lives alone or in a pair, although groups of up to seven are known in Libya. It is not strongly territorial, and the home ranges of different groups often overlap. One range in the Negev was calculated at 61 square kilometres.

  Scent does much of the talking. The hyena smears a paste from its anal pouch, nicknamed hyena butter, on grass, stalks, stones and tree trunks. Its makeup changes with the animal's age and population of origin. It is shaped partly by fermenting bacteria, including many anaerobic species from the phylum Bacillota, also called Firmicutes. Young hyenas carry a variable mix of microbes, while adults have more uniform communities with set types and amounts of each group. When aggressive, a hyena raises a black patch near its mid-back. Friendly greetings involve licking that region, sniffing noses, extruding the pouch or pawing at each other's throats. The species is far less vocal than the spotted hyena, limited to a chattering laugh and howling.

  Pairs are monogamous. The male sets up the den with the female and helps feed the cubs. Breeding seasons depend on place. Hyenas in Transcaucasia breed in January and February, those in southeast Turkmenia in October and November, and captive animals breed year-round. Gestation lasts 90 to 91 days. Cubs arrive with adult markings, closed eyes and small ears, unlike newborn spotted hyenas, which are almost fully developed but have unmarked black coats. Their eyes open after 7 to 8 days, and they leave the den at one month. Weaning comes at 2 months, after which both parents feed them. By autumn they are half the size of their parents. Wild hyenas can live 12 years, and captive ones have reached 23.

  Dens vary. A hyena may dig its own. It may also take over caves, rock fissures, erosion channels and burrows once used by porcupines, wolves, warthogs and aardvarks. By day it hides in caves, pits, thickets, reeds and plume grass to escape predators, heat or winter cold. Dens in the Karakum have entrances 0.67 to 0.72 metres wide and run 4.15 to 5 metres with no side chambers. Dens in Israel are far grander, exceeding 27 metres in length. Whatever the size, a pile of bones at the entrance gives the resident away.

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• 5. Bones and Rivals

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  Those bones at the den entrance come from the hyena's main trade. It is chiefly a scavenger, feeding on the carcasses of hoofed animals such as zebra, wildebeest, gazelle and impala at various stages of decay. It also eats fresh bones, cartilage, ligaments and marrow. Long bones are crushed to fine particles and swallowed, though sometimes a bone goes down whole. The hyena is not picky, but it refuses the flesh of vultures.

  It also kills on occasion. Hares, rodents, reptiles and birds are fair game. The hyena runs prey down, grabs it by the flank or groin and tears out the viscera. Only the larger hyenas of the Middle East, Asia Minor, Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent are thought to attack big prey. There is no evidence of the smaller Arabian and East African animals doing so.

  The menu shifts with the landscape. In Turkmenistan, hyenas take wild boar, kulan, porcupines and tortoises. Oil willow fruits are a seasonal staple in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, and grasshoppers matter in the Caucasus. In Israel, the hyena eats garbage, carrion and fruit. In eastern Jordan it relies on feral horse and water buffalo carcasses and village refuse. A scavenging diet makes the hyena thirstier than most carnivores. A hyena with cubs carries food back to the den rather than eating on the spot. Because its food is so rich in calcium, its droppings turn white quickly and can be seen from far away.

  Other predators contest the same scraps. The grey wolf competes with the hyena in the Middle East and Central Asia. In Central Asia, a large share of the hyena's diet comes from wolf kills. In Israel, a lone hyena dominates a lone wolf, but a wolf pack can push a single hyena off a carcass. The two species sometimes share dens. Rarely, a hyena travels and lives among a wolf pack without harm to either side. The hyena offers a better nose and more strength, and the wolves may track large prey more skillfully.

  Red foxes challenge hyenas over big carcasses. They give way on unopened ones, because the hyena's jaws tear open hide too tough for them. Foxes use their speed to harass hyenas, sometimes seeming to torment them for sport, and a fox that mistimes an attack is killed. The hyena also scavenges from the kills of tigers, leopards, cheetahs and caracals. A caracal can drive off a subadult hyena. A hyena usually beats a leopard, a cheetah or a tiger cub in a one-on-one dispute, but adult tigers dominate it. In Gujarat, India, it shares ground with Asiatic lions in Gir Forest National Park and with sloth bears in Balaram Ambaji Wildlife Sanctuary.

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• 6. Folklore and Charms

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  Zakariya al-Qazwini, who lived from 1204 to 1283, wrote of a tribe he called the Hyena People. In his book Marvels of Creatures and the Strange Things Existing, he made a claim about them. If one stood among 1,000 people, a hyena could pick him out and eat him. A Persian medical treatise from 1376 explains how to cure the kaftar, cannibals said to be half man and half hyena. In 1406, Al-Doumairy wrote in Hawayan Al-Koubra that striped hyenas were vampiric creatures that attacked people at night and sucked blood from their necks. He added that they attacked only the brave. Arab folklore says hyenas can mesmerize victims with their eyes, or sometimes with their pheromones. Until the end of the 19th century, Greeks believed in a darker fate for werewolves. Their bodies, if not destroyed, would haunt battlefields as vampiric hyenas drinking the blood of dying soldiers.

  Across the Near and Middle East, the hyena is generally seen as an incarnation of jinn and as a symbol of treachery and stupidity. In Afghanistan, India, Pakistan and Palestine, the picture is more mixed. People feared the animal, but they also saw it as a symbol of love and fertility. Among the Baloch, witches and magicians are said to ride striped hyenas at night.

  The animal also left marks on the map and in scripture. Shaqq al-Diba means cleft of the hyenas, and Wadi Abu Diba means valley of the hyenas. Some scholars have read both places as the Biblical Valley of Zeboim in 1 Samuel 13:18. The Hebrew word tsavoa literally means colored creature. It appears in Jeremiah 12:9, where the King James Version translates it as speckled bird. Henry Baker Tristram argued that a hyena was more likely. In Gnosticism, the Archon Astaphaios is drawn with a hyena-like face.

  Body parts became charms. The ancient Greeks and Romans prized the hyena's blood, excrement, eyes, tongue, hair, skin and fat. They also used the ash of various parts. All of it was thought to ward off evil and secure love and fertility. The Greeks and Romans also thought that wearing one particular part as an amulet on the upper arm made a man irresistible to women. Iranian folklore describes a stone found inside the animal as a protective charm, worn on the upper arm. In Iran, a dried pelt is held to be a powerful charm of attraction. In the Pakistani province of Sindh, Muslims hang a hyena tooth over their churns so the milk does not lose its baraka. Hyena hair serves in love magic or as a sickness charm in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Northern Indians prize the blood as medicine and say eating the tongue fights tumors. In the Khyber area, burned fat is used for virility, while in India it is a cure for rheumatism.

  Some of these practices turned into sayings. Dari and Pashto share a proverb built on a love rite that uses the body of a female hyena. It describes something that happens as smoothly as can be. Another expression, about possessing the anus of a hyena, describes someone attractive with many lovers.

  The animal has also been honored officially. It is the national animal of Lebanon.

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• 7. Hunters and Companions

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  In the 1880s, a hyena in the Erivan Governorate was reported to have attacked people, especially sleeping children, over three years. In one year alone, 25 children and 3 adults were wounded. Local authorities offered a reward of 100 rubles for every hyena killed. More attacks followed in Transcaucasia, particularly in 1908. In Azerbaijan, hyenas killed children sleeping in courtyards during the 1930s and 1940s. In 1942, a guard asleep in his hut at Golyndzhakh was mauled. A child was attacked near Serakhs in 1948. In 1962, nine children were thought to have been taken in six weeks in the town of Bhagalpur in Bihar. In 1974, hyenas killed 19 children up to the age of four in Karnataka and Bihar. Yet a five-year census in Madhya Pradesh found only three people attacked by hyenas. That was the lowest total among the animals counted, which also included wolves, gaur, boar, elephants, tigers, leopards and sloth bears.

  Hyenas also dig up the dead. In Turkey, people lay stones on graves to stop the animals from reaching bodies. During World War I, the Turks imposed conscription, called safar barlek, on Lebanon. People who fled north to avoid it died in large numbers, and hyenas ate many of the bodies.

  Livestock losses are a steady complaint. Goats, sheep, dogs and poultry are the usual victims. Reports of larger animals may sometimes be scavenging misread as killing. Substantial numbers of attacks are reputed in Egypt, Ethiopia, India and Iraq, and possibly Morocco. Hyenas have also damaged melon fields and date palms in Israel and Egypt, and watermelon and honey melon plantations in Turkmenistan.

  Hunting traditions vary. Ancient Egyptian peasants hunted hyenas for duty and amusement. Algerian hunters thought killing one was beneath their dignity because of its reputation for cowardice, and British sportsmen in British India felt much the same. Cornered by hunting dogs, a hyena will play dead and stay that way for a long time, even when badly bitten. Horsemen sometimes speared hyenas, but the animals doubled back and turned often, which made for long chases. In the Soviet Union, hunting was not organised, and most hyenas died in traps set for other animals. Pelts sold for between 45 kopeks and 1 ruble 80 kopeks. The coarse fur was often sold as poor dog or wolf fur, though hyena skin was once used to prepare chamois leather.

  Some hunters take them alive. In southern Punjab, Kandahar and Quetta, hyenas are captured for hyena-baiting, where they fight trained dogs while held on ropes. In Kandahar, hunters called payloch, meaning naked foot, enter dens unclothed with a noose in hand. They murmur "turn into dust, turn into stone" to a cornered hyena, which supposedly falls into a trance and lets them drag it out. Mesopotamian Arab hunters once used flattery, believing the animal understood Arabic. They told it, "you are very nice and pretty and quite like a lion; indeed, you are a lion."

  Hyenas have also been eaten. A mural in the tomb of Mereruka at Sakkara suggests Old Kingdom Egyptians force-fed hyenas to fatten them. The archaeologist Burchard Brentjes argued that the animals shown were an extinct population of Egyptian aardwolves. Writers of the 19th and early 20th centuries noted hyena meat eaten by some Egyptian peasants. Arabian Bedouins, Palestinian laborers, Sinai Bedouins and Tuaregs ate it too. Somalia saw the same. Among some Bedouins of Arabia, it counted as medicine rather than food.

  Raised young and handled firmly, a striped hyena can be fully trained and may become as affectionate as a well-trained dog. The ancient Egyptians, who did not hold hyenas sacred, supposedly tamed them for hunting. A pet hyena still gives off a strong odour that no amount of bathing hides. In the wild, hyenas kill dogs, but captive-raised ones can bond with them.

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• 8. Counting Survivors

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  Lebanon holds the largest national estimate in the data, 4,000 to 4,500 striped hyenas. There the animal is protected by law and by culture, and the risk of extinction is rated low. Elsewhere the picture darkens. The IUCN lists the species as near-threatened. Its global population is estimated at under 10,000 mature individuals. It faces deliberate and incidental persecution as well as a shrinking supply of prey. It may come close to a continuing decline of 10 percent over the next three generations.

  Many countries cannot say how many they have. Afghanistan, Chad, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Syria are among the places with unknown populations. Where numbers exist, they are small. Algeria has 50 to 100 hyenas, despite protection under décret no. 83-509, and they are declining from poaching, forest fires and disturbed dens. The Caucasus holds 150 to 200 across Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, hunted for fur and in revenge for attacks on people. Uzbekistan has 25 to 100 and Nepal 10 to 50. Kuwait is listed as having none, and the species there is probably extinct. In Morocco, a protected but drastically declining population has retreated to the southern mountains.

  Traffic takes a toll. Road accidents are the most serious threat in Israel, which counts 100 to 170 hyenas. That population has largely recovered from the strychnine poisoning campaigns of 1918-1948. But the reserves that hold it may be too small to keep it viable. Roadkill is also the most frequently recorded cause of death in Tanzania.

  Protection is uneven. In India, which holds 1,000 to 3,000, hyenas are protected only inside conservation areas. Outside them, poaching, competition with leopards over shelter and shrinking food stocks drive a decline. Ethiopia allows hunting under special permit for 40 EtBirr, about 20 US dollars, for science, education or zoology. Pakistan asked for the species to be placed in CITES Appendix III. The strongholds are continuous stretches of Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania, along with open country on India's Deccan Plateau.

  Not every country treats the hyena as an enemy. In Oman, striped hyenas have no protection, but they are not officially persecuted either, because people consider them useful scavengers.

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