The hyena men of Harar
In the walled Muslim city of Harar, men feed wild spotted hyenas by hand each night, a practice that grew from the 1950s and 1960s out of an older pact between the city and its hyenas.
1960 CE · 9.31, 42.13 · status: account
The account
Harari tradition says that during a famine the people made peace with the hyenas by offering them porridge, and each year on the eve of Ashura porridge is set out at shrines; how much the hyenas eat is read as an omen for the coming year. The best-known feeder, Yusuf Mume Saleh, began in the 1960s and passed the role to his son Abbas in the 2010s. Hyenas move freely through the old city's gaps in the wall at night.
The sceptical view
The feeding is real and now partly a tourist show; the omen tradition is folklore studied by anthropologists such as Marcus Baynes-Rock.