There’s a reason that the hyena is the bad guy of so many African fables.
And by so many African fables of course I am only referencing the Lion King.
How many African fables do you think I know?
Hyenas are rarely pleasant.
They eat the dead.
They laugh when they attack.
They could bite through your femur like a human going through a popsicle
and their stomach acid would digest the bones.
No.
Hyenas don’t want to be our friends.
They want to eat our corpses.
They want to take our scraps.
They want to hunt our livestock.
And yet, despite all of that, there are those of us who are trying to befriend them.
Because when you strip everything else away, hyenas are really useful creatures.
When you remove the fear, you can see them for what they really are.
So today, for no other reason than to show it’s possible,
I’m going to feed a hyena off the top of my head.
In East Africa, before the advent of plastics, they'd never really had a garbage problem.
In this region, they’d long since come up with an ingenious way of dealing with their waste.
And it was incredibly important that they do so.
For us it's hard to imagine, because few of us have actually dealt with real filth.
But for most of human history it has been one of the major drivers of illness and death.
If an animal dies in the street, what do you with it?
In theory, if you leave it in the road, you’ve contaminated your town.
If you throw it in the river, you’ve either contaminated your water, or at the very least, somebody’s water.
Somebody with a pretty good idea of where you live, as well.
But you have to get rid of it.
And getting rid of it is much harder than it seems.
Even if you have all the tools required to lift it out of town, you still haven’t really solved the problem.
After all, where do you put it?
For most towns in Ethiopia, the surrounding area is entirely pastureland or farms.
Anywhere you set that corpse is going to be in somebody’s way.
On somebody’s land.
It isn’t so simple as just drop it off at the dump.
What if there is no dump?
And this problem isn’t just limited to the occasional natural death of an animal.
There are many places that we create waste.
Our bathrooms.
Our kitchens.
Our markets.
And perhaps most importantly, our slaughterhouses.
Despite our best intentions, nobody’s really using all parts of the buffalo, so to speak,
and the offal of hundreds of animals per day has to find its way somewhere.
So, enter the hyena.
Those towns that have cooperated with hyenas have undeniably done better than those who haven’t.
After all, hyenas will eat just about anything.
They’ll eat putrified, rotting flesh.
No problem.
They’ll eat human feces.
No problem.
They’ll even dig up our dead and eat the bones straight out of the graveyard.
Which, ok, yeah, that is a small problem.
Hyenas really do put the omni in omnivore.
They’re like the giant, angry raccoons of Africa.
But unlike raccoons, their downsides are far more dangerous than they are annoying.
While they’re primarily known as scavengers, hyenas are happy to hunt for their meat when they have to.
And if nobody provides the meat to them, they’ll take whatever they can find.
In this part of the world, there are near-infinite stories of people
being pulled from their bed at night and chewed on.
There are stories of homeless people being ripped off the street like a smorgasbord.
In the capital of Addis, where it’s said that there are a thousand hyenas roaming the streets at night,
there are even apocryphal stories of the government rounding up street children
and releasing them where they'll be eaten.
Yet, even with all the risks, cities like Harar have popped holes in their ancient wall
just to make sure that the hyenas can get in.
They’ve all internalized the price that they pay.
To put it simply, it’s better than the alternative.
But that said, not everyone sees the trade.
When Europeans came to Africa, they saw little value in keeping the hyenas around.
To them, they were no more than wolves.
And in turn, they eradicated them like wolves.
They saw no return value, and therefore they had no problem destroying them wholesale.
In many parts of the continent where colonizers took control, there are few, if any, hyenas remaining.
But Europe never truly conquered the Horn.
And here, they’ve shown the world that there are more ways to interact with a beast than simply killing it.
If an animal dies in Harar, you can leave it where it is.
If a slaughterhouse wants to get rid of its offal, all it has to do is chuck it out the window.
By the morning, the only thing remaining will be a stain.
The hyenas of this city have long since learned that humans produce waste.
Delicious, life-giving waste.
And if they can work with us, they can benefit from that bounty.
It’s the main reason they’re still around while all the other cats have died off.
But not every day sees a dead donkey.
Not every town has a slaughterhouse.
From the human side of things, we’ve learned the hard way that if we can’t provide enough meat,
the trash collectors might eat our kids.
They’ll definitely eat our livestock.
So in the 1960’s, a local herdsman from Harar decided the best way to protect his flock was
to make sure the hyenas coming to town were always fed.
If he gave them scraps, he realized, they wouldn’t take the meal.
And over the decades, as Ethiopia opened to the world, what was once an honest attempt to placate nature
morphed into tourists paying money to feed a hyena straight from their mouth.
Once BBC Planet Earth caught wind, and featured the ritual prominently in one of their episodes,
they were no longer being fed to sate the needs of the hyenas,
now they are being fed to sate the needs of us.
What was once just a way to live together peacefully has become a business.
Today, there are three different ways to see the hyenas in Harar.
At one, tourists line up like it's Disneyland to watch a descendant of that original herdsman call in a few beasts.
He sits them on a chair, and depending on which hyena came close has them perform a trick.
It’s a bit like clockwork.
In another, you watch the hyenas from a distance as they come to a trash dump near the slaughterhouse.
They come every night, but you still pay a man to feed them.
In the third, you simply walk around the city.
If you spend enough time in the nights of Harar, you will see a hyena.
That said, I highly doubt that this hyena Disneyland will lead to anything good.
Certainly not pet hyenas.
As far as I can tell, they don’t actually want to be our friends.
They just want to eat our scraps.
And from my point of view, that’s a far more valuable symbol to learn from.
We shouldn’t need to control an animal to live alongside it.
We shouldn't need to be able to feed it directly from our mouth.
Even the beasts that seem the nastiest can have a direct value to human society, so long as we let them.
So long as we understand the trade.
Tourists feeding hyenas is not helping nature.
I think that's pretty clear.
It's a far cry from good conservancy.
That said, I do think there’s something interesting in the story of how we got here.
Because it says, to me at least, that there are more ways to interact with a beast
than simply killing it.
And now that Europe has turned around and is starting to reintroduce the predators
that it once eradicated, I think it's a lesson that we can we can all learn.
This is Rare Earth.
Before I go, if any of you in Toronto want to start a raccoon feeding business, I'll be the first person in line.
I’ll be the second person in line. I'll have that chicken all over my head.