Every night, Abbas Yusuf climbs over the ancient walls of Ethiopia’s holy city of Harar and begins calling out the animals’ names.
Kamaridani “Like the Moon”. Chaltu, “sophisticated”. and his favorite, Jarujara, “the one who hurries.”
A spotted hyena emerges from the darkness and retrieves a piece of meat from a stick held between its teeth.
For Abbas, these carnivores are welcome visitors. “I prepare the meat,” he says in his native Oromo. “And I will watch over the guests who come and see them off in peace.”
Mr. Abbas is one of Mr. Haller’s last “hyena men,” continuing the tradition of feeding Africa’s most feared predators – even in his own home.
He has become something of an attraction, with visitors paying to watch nighttime feedings and take photos up close with the wildlife.
Hyenas, night hunters with sinister-sounding “cackles,” are world-famous as the villains of the savannah. But in Ethiopia, new research suggests hyenas could help solve municipal waste problems, improve public health and even fight climate change.
Dr. Gidei Irga, a wildlife ecology expert based in Mekele, the capital of the Tigray region north of Harar, has been studying urban hyenas for more than 15 years.
Irga explains that hyenas have “very flexible behavior.” Hyenas, who live in large matrilineal societies, often work together to hunt and raise their young. They are formidable predators and may scavenge for food if given the opportunity.
As Africa becomes increasingly urbanized, hyenas and other wild animals move closer to human life, especially towards landfills. At night in Mek’ele, wild hyenas “commute” from underground burrows in the suburbs to the city’s landfill.
A recent study led by Irga from the University of Sheffield and Mekelle University found that Mekelle’s urban scavengers – ranging from hyenas to vultures to stray dogs – dispose of around 5,000 tonnes of organic waste a year, saving the council $100,000 in waste disposal costs. 90% of the work is done by spotted hyenas.
In cities with patchy waste collection, the company’s cleaning services reduce carbon emissions by decomposing organic waste and recycling nutrients from uneaten meat that would otherwise rot on the roadside. Other research by Irga suggests it can also stop the spread of deadly diseases such as anthrax and bovine tuberculosis.
These “ecosystem services” are popular with residents, with 72% of the more than 400 households interviewed by researchers considering hyenas and other scavengers beneficial.
“City cleaners benefit from the waste that residents dispose of, and local residents benefit from these types of waste disposal services,” Irga told CNN. “It’s an interaction.”
Irga explains that coexistence is generally peaceful, but relations were strained by the 2020-2022 Tigray war. With less food for hyenas to scavenge, people near battle sites began preying on more livestock and feeding on human remains. Many internally displaced people still live in crowded camps on the outskirts of Mekelle, where they are exposed to attacks by hyenas.
In a previous study of four Ethiopian cities, Irga found that people’s perceptions of hyenas varied widely. In Mekele they are respected as cleaners, but in the southern city of Arba Minch they are considered “nuisance animals” and in Harar, home of the hyena men, they are respected.
Harar’s Old Town, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is a place where humans and hyenas have coexisted for at least 500 years.
The 16th-century walls were raised with several small holes at the base, known to locals as “Walaba Nduru” (hyena’s den). At night, the animals cross the wall in droves to scavenge for meat discarded by local butchers.
What started as a way to keep hyenas fed and prevent them from attacking livestock and humans has turned into a hyena man tradition of feeding hyenas with their hands and mouth.
Abbas learned this practice from his father, Yusuf Mme Saleh, who started feeding the hyenas in his neighborhood in the 1950s to keep them away from his goats.
“I was preparing meat every day,” Abbas told CNN. “I used to watch it when my dad was feeding it. Since then, I haven’t been scared of it.”
He started working at the age of seven and took over his father’s business in his 20s.
Anthropologist Marcus Baines Locke, who spent years studying this coexistence and later wrote Among the Bone Eaters, watched the older Yusuf and his son at work.
“He didn’t just see hyenas as animals, he saw them as human beings with different personalities and different positions within the hyena society,” Bainsrock told CNN.
He explained that the relationship built slowly as they got used to each other’s presence. Although Yusuf did not train them in the traditional sense, he learned to read the behavior, rank, and temperament of each.
Next, the hyenas learned to recognize the parents and offspring they fed and the names they gave them. Humans and hyenas adapted to each other in a mutually beneficial relationship, with one subsisting on curious tourists and the other providing food.
“The hyenas roamed freely,” Bainsrock said in his doctoral thesis. “Even at night, when there were no tourists, the hyenas were fed.”
Unlike other Ethiopian cities, Harar residents see hyenas as both environmental protectors and spiritual scavengers. They are believed to consume jinn, which are evil spirits in Islamic tradition. “People feel safer in town because the hyenas are driving the jinn away,” Baines-Rock says.
In Harari, the local language spoken by fewer than 30,000 people, hyenas are known as “waraba”, meaning “newspaperman”, and are believed to carry messages from the spirit world.
Spotted hyena habitat is shrinking across Africa. When farms and roads cross their territory, hyenas turn to hunting livestock, and farmers turn against them.
Entrapped, poisoned, and shot in retaliation for livestock attacks, they cover a wide range of habitats and their numbers have dwindled to between 27,000 and 47,000 individuals, even outside protected areas.
The decline is even more worrying for their three closest relatives: the striped hyena, the elusive brown hyena, and the aardwolf.
They are often considered dangerous pests, and the IUCN Hyena Expert Group has identified their negative reputation as a direct threat to their survival.
Fear of hyenas has deep roots. Humans and hyenas have been competing for the same carcasses since at least 2.5 million years ago, when our ancestors began eating meat, Bainsrock said. He added that modern culture has perpetuated that prejudice, as seen in Disney’s animated classic “The Lion King” and its depiction of a pack of cackling, malevolent hyenas.
In Ethiopia, “people don’t just look at hyenas through a single lens,” Bainsrock explains. “Animals can be considered dangerous, but they can also be considered beneficial.”
From raccoons and crows in North America to ibis lieutenants known as “bottle chickens” in India and Australia, urban scavengers around the world remain considered nuisance pests.
But many of them play important roles in our shared urban ecosystem. ‘Apex’ scavengers such as hyenas and vultures are disproportionately persecuted because of their size and reputation, and their decline threatens human health around the world.
“We’re creating an environment where animals become scavengers,” Bainsrock says. “But given the lack of human intervention, they’re just doing beautiful things in their environment.”
As well as his own research, Irga argues that to change the global reputation of urban garbage collectors, we need to demonstrate their value by “providing them with a safe space through the media, documentaries, school programs, and urban planning.”
In Harar, the growing sprawl surrounding the old walled city is cutting off many of the routes and spaces used by hyenas, threatening their ancient coexistence.
Near the wasteland where Abbas feeds, the government is capitalizing on this unique relationship by building an “ecopark” with shops and a museum where tourists can watch the feedings in a more controlled environment.
Irga said over-habituation to humans could cause hyenas to lose their natural wariness, leading to more attacks on humans and livestock, making them more vulnerable to retaliation.
Still, Abbas isn’t worried about the tradition ending. “This feeding is passed down from generation to generation,” he says. “I’m working on passing that on to my son in a beautiful way.”
