The Clan
I walked into the clinic at Sunninghill in Johannesburg with my shirt covered in blood and my hand held to my nose. When the doctor moved my hand, most of my nose came away from my face
Just as in my childhood, I’m on first-name terms with the medicos and nurses at Sunninghill, and usually their first question when I walk in bleeding is “Lion or hyena, Kev?” More often than not the answer is hyena, as apart from motorcycle accidents (and the incident with the missing toe in the bicycle sprocket) these animals have inflicted the most serious injuries I’ve suffered in the course of my work. A hyena called Bongo was responsible for me almost losing my nose two months before my wedding to my beautiful wife, Mandy.
“This is going to hurt, Kev,” the doctor said to me, as he turned to the gleaming tray of sterile torture devices the nurse had prepared for him.
I don’t fear much in life. I’ve raced superbikes, I fly, and I interact with lions for a living, but there is nothing that scares me quite so much as a hypodermic needle. I hate them like I hate nothing else in the world. Seriously, I know I could never be a drug addict. The thought of sticking a needle in my body is the worst thing I can conjure up if I want to scare myself. I have gotten better with age, but for a guy who gets as many scrapes, cuts, and bites as I do, this is not a good phobia to have.
“Thanks for that, Doc,” I said, trying to be brave but wincing from the pain talking caused in my nose. I was assuming that he was making it sound worse than it really would be, so that when the hideous, sharpened point entered the torn flesh of my face, it wouldn’t be quite as bad as I feared.
“It’s going to sting like hell and hurt for at least five minutes,” the doctor said, taking the syringe in his gloved hands and pushing the plunger a little to clear the air bubble.
“I thought that maybe the nose is, like, not the most sensitive part of the body,” I snuffled through a mouthful of blood and mucous.
He smiled a little. “Kev, this is going to burn like someone has poured acid into the wound, and then it’s going to feel like I’ve pulled your entire nose off your face.”
“Thanks, Doc.” He was right. On all counts.
Later, after I had stopped crying and the doctor had stitched my now numb nose back to my face, I answered the casualty nurse’s “lion or hyena” question.
“Neither.”
I explained that I’d gone into the hyena enclosure and slid the gate closed. My hyena friends, as usual, came loping up to greet me. Hyenas love having their chins scratched, like dogs, and Bongo was first in line for the special treatment. I was sitting on the ground with him when one of the others came up behind me, out of sight. While I was talking to Bongo, the other hyena—I’m not sure which one it was—touched the side of my face with his nose. I got a fright, and as I turned my head I caught my nose on a sharp piece of steel that was protruding from the security gate. As I whipped my head around, the skin tore down to the septum.
It’s a myth that tame hyenas will savage you if they scent blood. As I held one hand to my bleeding nose and staggered to my feet, Bongo was licking my free hand as if to say, “Kev, why are you leaving me, buddy? We were having such fun.”
Rodney Fuhr decided early on in my time at the Lion Park that he wanted to expand the range of animals we were keeping and turn the facility from a Lion Park into a predator park. Eventually our species tally included cheetah, caracal, jackals, wild dogs, leopards, and black leopards, and even a South American jaguar, but the first acquisition on his list was spotted hyena.
Hyenas have a bad reputation as marauding scavengers and this has been perpetuated by Hollywood, documentary makers, and even local African tradition. In parts of the continent people believe that witches ride on the backs of hyenas in the dead of night. The truth about hyenas is that they are intelligent predators who hunt as well as scavenge. They live in strictly ordered clans where the females rule supreme. The highest ranking male in a hyena clan is still subservient to the lowest ranking female. It’s a little like marriage.
To be honest, I thought Rodney was a little mad, but he was the boss. None of us at the park knew very much about hyenas, but we hit the phones and eventually found a guy who was breeding spotted hyenas in captivity. He offered to sell us two cubs, for what I thought was an astronomical price. However, Rodney paid, and the baby hyenas, named Ed and Shanzi, were delivered to us.
These little guys were aggressive as hornets, and even though I hadn’t been a hundred per cent convinced of Rodney’s logic in buying them, I was fascinated by them. To start off, we had to try and work out what sex they were. This is not as easy as it sounds, particularly when you have never seen a hyena up close. Female hyenas have external sex organs—that is, an organ like a penis. We were all trying to work out the difference—assuming these two hyenas were different sexes—and it was my job to tickle them in the crotch to produce a reaction. I felt like a hyena pervert. These two looked pretty similar down there and we decided they were both probably males.
Right from the start people started telling me that hyenas were not lions, and there was no way I could carry on with them in the same way I did with my buddies Tau and Napoleon.
“These are display animals, not relationship animals,” someone who probably knew even less about hyenas than I did told me. “You might be able to play with them when they’re small, but after a year they’ll rip you to pieces.”
As usual, I wanted to see for myself, and I got bitten to shreds by those two little animals. I was like Kev the Hyena Punching Bag and Pin Cushion. I’d go into the enclosure with Ed and Shanzi and they would wreak havoc on my ankles. My shins would be covered with bruises, and if they ever locked on to my arm it felt like they were about to bite it off. I was petrified of those baby hyenas, far more so than I’d ever been with young Tau and Napoleon.
I still never went in with a stick and I tried using the same tactics I had with the lions. Eventually the babies would tire of biting me and sit down a distance away from me. Even though they caused me pain and people continued to say I was wasting my time, I felt sorry for them in their small enclosure. I thought they needed stimulation and if that came in the form of my ankles and shins, then so be it. Also, I didn’t want to admit defeat.
The hyenas proved popular with visitors and we expanded the numbers to five, with Trelli, Bonnie, and Chucky. We were convinced Trelli was a girl, but when Bonnie really displayed her phallus one day in all its glory, we could all see how different it was from the others so, in fact, we had one girl and four boys. It had been a very confusing process.
“Howzit, Kevin, it’s Maureen here.”
I rubbed the sleep from my eyes as I mumbled a return greeting into my mobile phone. It was early morning and I wondered why Maureen, a local tour operator who often visited the Lion Park, was calling me at home.
“Kevin, I just thought I’d let you know, there are a couple of spotted hyenas walking down the N14 and I thought they might belong to you.”
I nearly tripped over in my rush to get dressed. I jumped in my four-by-four and set off for the Lion Park. The N14 is a busy motorway that links Krugersdorp with Pretoria and in the morning it is thick with commuter traffic. I called Ian at the park and he confirmed Bonnie and Chucky had done it again.
Hyenas, I have learned, are very clever animals, and Bonnie and Chucky were our two top escape artists. At six months they could escape from just about any enclosure we could find or build for them. They knew where the lock was on the sliding gate and if a careless attendant had forgotten to close the padlock, Bonnie and Chucky could knock the lock out of its latch and use their noses to slide the gate open. They had already broken out three or four times, but up until now their wanderings had been confined to within the Lion Park’s outer perimeter. I was picturing the news headlines as I crisscrossed the roads around Muldersdrift and tore up and down the main N14 motorway looking for our two escaped inmates.
The phone rang and I snatched it up, still driving and scanning the roadside. “Kev, it’s Ian. Come quick, the hyenas are back in the park.”
When I arrived, a cloud of dust following my vehicle as I roared up the dirt road to the park, I found Bonnie and Chucky waiting for me outside their enclosure, waiting to be let back in. They had apparently escaped sometime during the night, gone out for a wander, and returned at nine A.M. the next morning. Relieved, I gave them a gentle scolding then picked each of them up and plonked them back in their home.
There is a small office at the Lion Park where Ian and I have shared many an interesting story or engaged in debates. We were in the office laughing about our close call when Ian’s phone rang. As I sipped a cup of coffee I began to worry about the frown on his face as he spoke to the caller.
“Yes,” he said. “Oh, no. I see.”
Ian was still not smiling. “No, okay. Look, I’m very sorry about that. How about we give you three thousand rand, and we call it quits?”
“Give me the bad news,” I said when Ian ended the call.
“Bonnie and Chucky broke into a house down the road last night, terrorized the guy’s dogs, and destroyed his lounge suite.”
Forget Bonnie and Chucky—these two were Bonnie and Clyde.
We moved Bonnie and Chucky to the Lion Park’s equivalent of a maximum security prison cell, an enclosure with double-locked electrified fences. They still managed to get out a few more times, but in the process they taught me some lessons about hyena behavior.
After they escaped from Fort Knox yet again, I found them wandering in the park. Bonnie came peaceably and I put her back first, but when I carried Chucky into the enclosure he was squealing like a pig. Clearly he wasn’t ready to come home. Bonnie started biting me on the ankles and legs. When I put Chucky down, he and Bonnie ganged up on me and now they were both biting me. This was weird because I thought I had a really good relationship with both of them. I realized they were not little kids anymore, but I wasn’t ready for my first truly serious bite from a hyena. Bonnie reared up and grabbed my arm in her mouth and clamped down. Her teeth penetrated both sides of my arm and I felt the terrible crushing force of a hyena’s jaws, which is equivalent to seven hundred pounds per square inch of pressure, so the experts say. I needed stitches and my skin was black and blue.
I figured that either I had been taught a lesson or I’d had a lucky escape. Then I started to think about hyena society in the wild. When the hyenas ganged up on me, I think they were telling me my place in the hierarchy. I was the lowest of the low. They tolerated me, but that was about it, which was why they were biting me.
I discussed the hyenas with Rodney, and when I told him Ian and I were considering the idea of forming them into a clan, he was very enthusiastic, as he wanted them to start breeding. Up until now we had kept the hyenas singly or in pairs. Bonnie was at the right age for breeding, so we got an expert, Lawrence Frank, who had done a lot of research on hyenas to come to the park and advise us. I think Lawrence, like many other people, was surprised that I was able to interact with these three- and four-year-old hyenas and that I still had both my arms and legs—even if they were a bit scarred by now.
He agreed with us that forming a clan would give Bonnie more choice about who she wanted to mate with. Space was also becoming an issue, so from a management point of view it would be much better for us at the park if all the hyenas could live together in one of the larger enclosures. Even though Lawrence was an expert on hyenas in the wild, he admitted that we were probably in a better position to make decisions about the animals’ future than he was.
To begin the process we decided to divide an enclosure into sections and allow the various hyenas to get to know each other through the common fence. That seemed to work, but when we started putting different animals together they became really violent with each other. It was painful to watch. They would latch on to each others’ ears and start ripping and biting. We took a chance and let them get on with it, even though I winced when I heard cartilage tearing. What we learned was that this was part of hyena life. As the group slowly started coming together they would fight to establish a pecking order. If there was a fight, it would continue until one of the animals decided to submit to the other, and this was repeated each time we introduced a new hyena to the group. They were really violent, but we had to let them sort themselves into a clan.
We added another female, Geena, to the mix, and she and Bonnie used to fight like crazy for the top position. Female hyenas are generally bigger and more aggressive than the males and they have high levels of testosterone coursing through their bodies. It might sound cruel to some people, what we were doing, but in fact we were watching the establishment of a whole society.
One of our male hyenas, Trelli, was a good friend of mine. He was rough and tough, and while the other keepers at the park were scared of him, I used to play with him and even take him for rides in my car, which he loved. When I took him for a drive we would have to travel through the lion enclosure and that used to drive the lions crazy, but Trelli loved it.
His love of cars proved a bonus because one day a request came through from an advertising company that wanted to organize a photo shoot of a spotted hyena that didn’t mind posing in a car. I had just the man for the job and Trelli performed like a star. There is a beautiful shot of him with his head out the back window of an estate car, like a dog. During the filming of Dangerous Companions, which was about me and my relations with the animals at the Lion Park, we shot a lovely scene in which Gambit, our resident tame giraffe, came up to my pickup to check out Trelli. They touched noses together and Trelli, thankfully, resisted the temptation to rip Gambit’s face off while the camera rolled.
I put Trelli in with the clan, but the other hyenas hammered him. Around people he was dominant, but with his own kind he was the lowest of the low. Ironically, Geena, who became the dominant female after winning against Bonnie, mated with Trelli, behind the backs of all the other superior males! When the other males caught him and Geena going at it, they gave him an even worse time. I used to take Trelli out and give him pep talks, telling him to go back in and assert himself over the others, but of course that didn’t work. In time we formed another clan, made out of rejects, who couldn’t cut it with Geena and her family, but even they picked on poor Trelli and I was worried they were going to kill him. In the end I had to take Trelli out and put him back in an enclosure by himself, even though he had done his duty with Geena.
When Geena gave birth to her second litter of cubs she became very protective. When I tried to approach her and the cubs she started giving me low growling calls, which told me not to come any closer, and I respected that. Interestingly, when Bonnie later gave birth to a single cub, it was a different situation. I arrived at the enclosure one morning and the clan was all very excited. All of them, except for Bonnie, rushed up to the fence to greet me, and when I walked in it was like they were all smiling. They had their tails up, which meant they were excited, and it seemed as though they were busting to tell me something. I walked in and found Bonnie in one of the concrete pipes the hyenas used as shelters. Nestled between her front paws was a cute little chocolate brown cub. She was quite relaxed and I was able to walk right up to them, slowly, and check it out. It was a first for me, and a touching moment.
As the clan became established, the hyenas started changing the way they interacted with people, as well as each other. When the animals were in separate enclosures, there were about five of us humans at the park who could go in with them and interact with them to varying degrees. The hyenas knew us by sight, smell, touch, the sound of our voices, and how we tasted—especially how we tasted. Slowly, the clan started asserting their dominance over us.
The hyenas were all getting older and stronger by this time, and one by one they started rejecting the people who had worked with them. Keepers who had patted and tickled the hyenas when they were younger started coming in for rough treatment, and one by one they began refusing to go in with the clan. The people who liked to carry sticks around the animals fared no better than the touchy-feely people. Hyenas eat bones, so a stick is nothing to them, and if you hit them with something to teach them a lesson it just makes them crazier. You can’t enforce or reinforce a relationship with a stick. They’d raise their tails and start giggling, getting themselves into an attacking frenzy, and another keeper would call it a day. With the clan already developed and functioning as a unit, if the dominant female decided she wanted to attack a human then the rest of her family would back her up.
With my lions I try to be part of the pride, although even then there are differing degrees to which I am accepted by individual members of the pride. I am like a brother—sometimes even a father—to some, a friend to others, and an acquaintance to the rest. Not all of my acquaintances like me, but they know me, and we respect each other. I’ve never gone into a lion enclosure thinking I must dominate them, but the situation was different with the hyenas. I needed to assert and maintain my dominance over the clan, but I couldn’t do that with a stick or a shock stick or a can of pepper spray, as that would just infuriate them. I had to be a hyena.
I was tough with them and I used to rough them up, in the same way one hyena would assert dominance over another. I would tackle them to the ground and roll them around; I would lift them up off the ground under their arms and swing them around, and I would bite them on the ears. I had to do this with all the hyenas, to assert my position in the clan, because they all wanted to challenge me. I also had to be down at their level, and it was a battle of wills as much as teeth.
If something happens to me there is one guy who could continue to do the work I do with lions and hyenas, in the same way that I do. His name is Rodney Nombekana and he is a fantastic guy.
Rodney was in his early twenties when he came to the Lion Park several years ago, from his home in Port St. Johns, in the Transkei region of the Eastern Cape. We call that part of South Africa the wild coast, because of its stark, spectacular beauty.
Rodney was one of several young black African gentlemen who were being sponsored by a private body, the Endangered Wildlife Trust, to study for a Field Guides Association of South Africa (FGASA) qualification. I imagine he pictured himself becoming a game ranger or guide for a private game reserve, or working for the national parks board when he qualified, but as part of his training he and some others visited us at the Lion Park.
Rodney stood out from the rest of the group from the first day. He was enthusiastic and excited and, like me, he would always ask questions. He didn’t take things at face value—he always wanted to know why I did what I did, and how I did it. He reminded me a bit of myself. He was a hard worker and a good listener, with an analytical mind. Unlike some young people, he didn’t expect to get to the top position in five minutes. He knew he would have to work hard, but that didn’t mean he had to do things the same way as they had always been done, simply because that was the norm. The feedback from tourist visitors to the park was excellent and many people took the time to tell us what a knowledgeable and polite guy he was. In time, the other trainees fell by the wayside, but Rodney attained his FGASA level one qualification and was offered a full-time job at the Lion Park. Although I have since left the Johannesburg Lion Park, Rodney followed me and still works with me to this day.
Rodney had a soft spot for hyenas and took the time to research the various African cultural beliefs, insights, and misunderstandings about these fascinating animals. We were in with the clan one day and I noticed that Agip, one of the males, was trying to dominate Rodney, who was backing away from the menacing animal.
“Hold your ground, Rodney,” I said. “If you turn away from him now you’ll be finished with the rest of the clan.”
“I’m not sure, Kev,” he said to me. “He’s going to bite me!” Agip had lowered his body and raised his tail. A hyena’s back and head are tough as nails, but their underbelly is their weakest point, so when they crouch you know they mean business. He was closing on Rodney.
“Push him, Rodney. Get your hands on him and push him back.” Rodney grabbed Agip and dug his feet into the dirt. Agip kept coming at him, snarling, and he started to whoop and giggle, a sure sign that he was upping the ante with Rodney and trying to intimidate him.
Although I do it often, it was exciting to see Rodney standing his ground against this powerful animal. Agip backed down and Rodney kept his place in the clan. It was great to watch and just reinforced my own respect for Rodney.
To this day the hyenas are excellent around Rodney. However, if I’m there at the same time, there are a couple of individuals who will try and gang up on Rodney in front of me. It’s an interesting dynamic; we all have our place in the clan.
We bought another hyena, Peggy, who was on her last legs. She was a real hand-me-down, in poor shape and with bad teeth. Amazingly, she gave us our first cubs, before Geena’s, but we had to hand-raise them because Peggy rejected them.
Spotted hyena cubs aren’t born with spots; they are a chocolate brown color. They are extremely cute and extremely vicious and they come into the world kicking and screaming and fighting. Hyenas are born fully mobile, with their eyes open, and with a full set of deciduous canine teeth, which they know how to use. They run around like little rats trying to bite each other and anything else that crosses their path. When a hyena baby clings on to your finger, believe me, it feels like your digit has been put in a vise grip lined with needles. They scream like little pigs, so loudly that people think you’re trying to murder them, when in reality the opposite is true. For some reason, hyenas also seem to pick the worst possible days to have their cubs, such as sub-zero days in the middle of winter, or during torrential rainfall in summer. Their babies come into the world either freezing their asses off or nearly drowning in mud and water.
So, raising our first cubs was difficult. They didn’t take easily to the feeding bottle like lion cubs; they would try to bite through the rubber teat. Sometimes they would not feed for four or five days, which initially worried me. I started researching baby hyenas, reading anything I could get my hands on in books and on the Internet, and I found out that this was normal, as in the wild, hyena mothers often have to leave their cubs in the den for long periods while they go out hunting and foraging. The reason the cubs can last so long without losing condition, I learned, was that their mother’s milk is very high in fat—much more, in fact, than the puppy milk formula that we usually fed to lion cubs. As a result, their diet consisted of a mixture of egg, cream, full-strength milk, and anything else we could think of that was high in fat and protein.
By this stage I was living with my then girlfriend Mandy and we had some hectic nights looking after Peggy’s cubs, who were like two little devils. Mandy has had to endure all sorts of predator cubs around the house but the hyenas were without doubt the most destructive. I learned the two best places to keep baby animals were the kitchen or bathroom because of the amount of cleaning involved, and because those rooms generally had fewer things that could be chewed. Even so, the hyena cubs savaged my toilet brush and loved jumping up and pulling all the toilet paper off the roll.
In the wild, cubs fight with each other for dominance. A brother and sister will fight until the female asserts her dominance and same-sex cubs will sometimes fight to the death. We had a boy and girl, and Mandy and I would have to separate them sometimes for their own good. I’ve had other cubs who have been so seriously injured by their siblings that we have had to take them to the vet. In the wild, if one is killed outright, or dies of an infected wound, the mother will take it out of the den for the other clan members to eat, or consume it herself.
Some people might think it’s fun to raise a predator cub, and while it has its moments there are many unpleasant chores that have to be done. Lionesses stimulate bowel movements in their cubs by licking their bottoms. I don’t do that, but I do have to rub them vigorously to make them defecate. The same went for the hyena cubs. When I noticed the hyena cubs weren’t urinating, I had to stimulate their organs. It worked and they started peeing in every direction—all over me.
Uno was a wild hyena, a stock raider, which meant she had been killing cattle. She was captured by the government nature conservation people. They called the Lion Park and offered her to us, rather than releasing her into the wild, as they knew she would return to the farms and wreak havoc all over again.
So, this wild animal was dumped on our doorstep and we didn’t know what to do with it. We didn’t even know what sex it was. We put her—as it turned out—in the hyena enclosure’s night pen, a solid room at the end of the compound, so she could recover from being captured. When she came around—I will never forget this—she was crapping all over her legs and cowering and running like crazy right at the brick walls. She had rubbed her head raw against the pen’s walls, to the extent that you could see the white of her skull. She was in a complete frenzy, and I actually thought at one point that it might have been kinder to put her down. She had never known life in captivity and it was clearly freaking her out.
After thinking about it, we decided that if we were going to keep her we should try introducing her to the clan, so she could be part of a new social system. I’d seen the ear biting and fighting that went on when we introduced hand-reared hyenas to each other, so I was more than a little concerned about how this wild creature would associate with the others.
My first thought, when the nature conservation people arrived with her, was that we would introduce the newcomer to the others in the clan in the same way that we had brought the rest of them together, putting her in an enclosure within or next to the clan’s so they could start off by getting to know each other through the fence. We never got that far. Uno was under so much stress that if we left her in her night enclosure for too much longer she would kill herself, so we just opened the gate and let her out with the rest of the hyenas.
Uno shot out of the pen like a bat out of hell. She couldn’t wait to escape and when she emerged into the sunlight, she was confronted by a bunch of other hyenas. She annihilated them! Our captive animals were completed frazzled by the onslaught they received from Uno and they just fell into line immediately. It was right then that we decided to name her because she was, without a doubt, and in a matter of minutes, Numero Uno.
This was a high-ranking woman, and she knew how to fight. The trouble was that Geena was not in the enclosure at the time we released Uno, and we knew that when the girls got together the fur was most definitely going to fly. We ended up putting Geena and Uno in an enclosure together—just the two of them—to let them sort things out. The two girls took one look at each other and battle commenced. They tore at each other’s ears and jostled and rolled and charged at each other as each tried to get the better of her opponent. They were whooping and giggling and biting and pawing. Geena went down a few times, but she just would not submit to Uno. Their thick necks were covered in a froth of saliva, and blood poured from their ears. There were puncture marks everywhere, but they kept on going ballistic. At times we thought we might have to intervene, but I knew that if Uno was ever going to join the larger clan then this fight had to happen. Slowly, Uno gained the better of Geena, but our original female would not back down easily.
Eventually we decided to release the rest of the clan, to take some of the heat off Geena, and maybe give her a chance to muster support. It didn’t help. Uno not only kept the pressure on Geena, she also sorted out every single one of the other hyenas and still had energy and attitude to spare. At that point, Numero Uno took over the clan.
Having introduced Uno to the clan, I wanted to see how she would react to me. I didn’t want to lose contact with the rest of the clan simply because there was a new hyena in charge, so I went into the enclosure, just as I always had.
Uno stared at me, but kept her distance. It seemed that she tolerated this weird two-legged creature interacting with the rest of what was by now her clan—just. I didn’t chase her or even walk up to her, but as the months went by she started approaching me, and came a little closer each time. She would sit and watch the way I tickled and played with the others and I think she made a decision that I was not a threat to them—or her—and that she might like some attention. If I did stray too close to her, she would circle me and the hairs on her back would rise as she displayed her aggression, and let me know that if I came closer she would have a piece of me. That was fine, and I kept a respectful distance of about five meters from her.
I will never forget the day that Uno came up to me and offered me her nose, stretching it toward my hand. She had come close a few times, standing just out of reach and bobbing her head up and down. This time, I extended my hand and she came right up to me and sniffed it. She had broken the barrier that she had imposed up to that time. It was her decision.
She sniffed my hand a second time. I held my breath, not knowing what would happen next. Then Uno gave my hand a lick. She was trusting me, big time, and I was trusting her right back. After that, when I approached Uno I did so on all fours, down at her level. In time, I was able to scratch her under the chin and behind the ear, but I knew I would never be able to pick her up under the arms and carry her around like I do with some of the others.
My experience with Uno got me thinking about the intelligence of a hyena. I could never have done what I did with her with a wild lion that had been captured by humans. This wild hyena, however, had the ability to sit there and rationalize the situation. For my part, I learned that I could form a bond with Uno—a relationship that allowed me to interact with the rest of her clan without threatening her. I did not seek to break her or dominate her, although I was dominant to the other clan members. Uno had had a terrible experience at the hands of the humans who had taken her from the wild and placed her in captivity, yet she could learn to trust me.
I have heard of a guy making contact with a clan of hyenas in the wild, but that was done over a long period of time. My experience with Uno happened in a compressed timeframe and I think it highlights how intelligent these animals are—intelligent, but naughty.
As the guy in charge of animals, I pushed for the clan, which was growing all the time, to be moved to one of the much larger fenced camps in the park, where tourists could drive their cars through, simulating the experience of a big game park. I thought it would be cool for people to see a clan operating in its element.
Ian and Rodney Fuhr approved the idea and we set to building a hyena den. We dug a pit and roofed it with a half-moon of concrete pipe, some tin, and some wooden poles. In the wild hyenas make dens in disused termite mounds, and in some of South Africa’s national parks they take up residence in concrete drainage culverts under the roads, so this new home was perfect for them. They loved it.
Everything was going well and the hyenas loved the additional space. Also, the tourists were enjoying seeing the clan interacting with each other and I felt good about striking a blow for hyenas, and giving people a chance to see what interesting animals they really were. What happened next, however, was that the hyenas started interacting with the tourists’ cars.
First it was a fender, then a rearview mirror, then a door handle, and finally a tire. They loved eating tires. The hyenas became better than a Johannesburg chop shop at dismantling cars, even while they were moving. People were driving around in circles, in panic, with the clan, led by Uno, chasing them around trying to tear pieces off the cars. Maybe Uno saw this as a chance to get some payback against the humans who had taken her out of the wild, or maybe she just liked the taste of car parts. Sadly, the cost of repairing damage to visitors’ cars signaled the end of that experiment, but the hyenas had enjoyed themselves immensely.