Humans and Hyenas by Keith Somerville

Author:Keith Somerville [Somerville, Keith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367436414
Google: Wnj7zQEACAAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-01-15T01:40:16+00:00

They would attack cattle, sheep, goats and people. Women out cultivating their fields were on occasion attacked and eaten by the hyenas deprived of their accustomed source of food.79 When he was first involved with conservation, Cowie said he could see good reasons to protect lions, elephants and rhino, but “could not see much sense in making a case to save ugly, useless animals like hyenas”, adding that “Hyenas are generally despised by everybody. In appearance they are malformed and cowardly…cringing like a cur”. But he gradually changed his mind and decided, “They are undoubtedly ridiculous animals, but I have learnt to have a warm feeling for them”.80 However, when the attacks on the women started in the late 1940s, he “set about reducing the hyenas by every means possible”, including poisoning – and in one night he killed 78 in an area where they had killed many Maasai cattle.81

The regular game reports by Blayney-Percival, the first head of Kenya’s Game Department, rarely mention hyenas, unless they posed a threat to livestock or people. In his book he made clear his dislike for them, yet how redolent of Africa they were, writing:

I hate him…home leave comes seldom, but when, after a run home, I lie awake and listen to that weird, wild voice of his out in the darkness of the plains, I am softened towards the hyæna. His voice is unlovely, but it is the most typical of African sounds, and I feel that I am really back in Africa…82

Like Cowie, he also noted how common they were around Nairobi, where they could be heard every night, and that they thought nothing of entering store-houses and other buildings to forage for food, especially hides and leather83. He added that, in some districts farmed by settlers, hyenas had declined as ostrich and livestock farmers had shot or poisoned them in large numbers.

Often when livestock were killed or people attacked by hyenas, rumours started that occult forces were involved. Caroline Buxton wrote in 1917 that near her farm in Laikipia there was an outbreak of stock killing. Local communities blamed a mythical creature they called a gadit, which supposedly walked on two legs and cracked the skulls of animals to eat their brains. The killing of the stock ended when a particularly large spotted hyena was killed.84 The chief game warden in the late 1920s, Capt Ritchie, wrote of the belief among some Kenyan communities of the existence of a kerit, also called a Nandi bear. This was a creature, reportedly having six toes on each foot, that killed children. Ritchie thought it was likely to be a large hyena with deformed feet.85 In a district called Tuso, 12 cattle were killed and the kerit was blamed, but Ritchie said that other attacks in the region had been carried out by a large hyena that had been described as like the southern African brown hyena, which is not found in Kenya.86

By the mid-1930s, wildlife ranges and numbers had been progressively reduced by hunting and the clearing of land for cultivation or livestock.

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