Every night, Abbas Yusuf crosses the ancient walls of the holy city of Harar, Ethiopia, and starts calling the animals by name.
Kamariya, “like the moon.” Chaltu, “refined.” And his favorite, Jarjaraa, “the hurrying one.”
A spotted hyena steps out of the darkness and takes a strip of meat from a stick he holds between his teeth.
To Abbas, these carnivores are welcome visitors. “I prepare the meat,” he says, in his native Oromo language. “And the guests who come, I take care of them and see them off in peace.”
Abbas is one of Harar’s last “hyena men,” holding onto the tradition of feeding one of Africa’s most feared predators — even inside his home.
He has become something of an attraction, with visitors paying to see the nightly feeds and have their photos taken up close with the wild animals.
Night hunters with an evil-sounding “laugh,” hyenas have earned a worldwide reputation as the villains of the savanna. But in Ethiopia, new research suggests hyenas could help solve the country’s problem of urban waste, improve public health — and even help in the fight against climate change.
North of Harar, in Mekelle — capital of the Tigray region — wildlife ecology expert Dr. Gidey Yirga has been studying urban hyenas for over 15 years.
Yirga explains hyenas have “very flexible behavior”: Living in large matriarchal societies, they often hunt and raise their cubs cooperatively. They are formidable predators and may turn to scavenging when the opportunity arises.
As Africa becomes increasingly urban, hyenas and other wild animals are brought closer to human life, especially toward landfills. When night falls in Mekelle, wild hyenas “commute” from their underground dens on the outskirts into the city’s landfills.
A recent study led by Yirga at the University of Sheffield and Mekelle University found that urban scavengers in Mekelle — from hyenas to vultures and stray dogs — process nearly 5,000 metric tons of organic waste a year, saving the city council $100,000 in waste disposal costs. Spotted hyenas do 90% of the work.
In a city with patchy waste collection, their cleaning services cut carbon emissions from the decomposition of organic waste and recycle the nutrients of leftover meat that would otherwise rot on roadsides. According to another study by Yirga, they also stop the spread of deadly diseases like anthrax and bovine tuberculosis.
These “ecosystem services” are well-received by residents, with 72% of over 400 households the researchers interviewed seeing hyenas and other scavengers as beneficial.
“The urban scavengers benefit from the waste that residents dispose of, and local residents benefit from the waste-clearing services of these species,” Yirga tells CNN. “It’s a mutualistic interaction.”
Yirga explains that while coexistence is generally peaceful, the 2020-2022 Tigray war strained the relationship: as hyenas had less to scavenge, those near battle sites preyed on more livestock and fed on human remains. Many internally displaced people still live in crowded camps on Mekelle’s outskirts, leaving them vulnerable to hyena attacks.
In a previous study across four Ethiopian cities, Yirga found that people’s perceptions of hyenas vary greatly. While in Mekelle they are respected as cleaners, in the southern city of Arba Minch they are seen as “nuisance animals” and in Harar — home of the hyena men — they are revered.
Harar’s UNESCO-listed old town has been a place of coexistence between humans and hyenas for at least 500 years.
Its 16th-century walls were raised with several small openings at their base, known by locals as “waraba nudul” — hyena holes. At night, the animals cross the wall in packs to scavenge the meat discarded by local butchers.
What started as a way to prevent attacks on livestock and people by keeping hyenas fed turned into the tradition of hyena men, who feed them by hand and by mouth.
Abbas learned the practice from his father —Yusuf Mume Salleh — who began feeding his hyena neighbors in the 1950s to keep them away from his goats.
“I would prepare the meat every day,” Abbas tells CNN. “When my father was feeding them, I would watch. After that, I stopped being afraid of them.”
He was seven when he started and took over his father’s work in his twenties.
Marcus Baynes-Rock, an anthropologist who spent years studying this coexistence and later wrote “Among the Bone Eaters,” watched the elder Yusuf and his son at work.
“He didn’t just see them as animals. He saw them as persons with different personalities and different places within hyena society,” Baynes-Rock tells CNN.
He explains the relationship was built slowly as they became habituated to each other’s presence. Yusuf did not train them in any traditional sense, but he learned to read each one’s behavior, rank and temperament.
In turn, the hyenas came to recognize the father-and-son feeders, and the names they gave them. Humans and hyenas were adapting to each other in a mutually beneficial relationship, with one making a living from curious tourists and the other securing a meal.
“The hyenas came and went at their leisure,” Baynes-Rock wrote in his doctoral thesis, and “On nights when there were no tourists, the hyenas were still fed”
Unlike in other Ethiopian cities, residents of Harar see hyenas as spiritual cleaners as much as ecological ones. They are believed to consume jinn, malevolent spirits in Islamic tradition. “People feel safer in the town,” Baynes-Rock says, “because the hyenas are chasing the jinn away.”
In Harari, the local language spoken by fewer than 30,000 people, hyenas are known as “waraba,” meaning “newsman,” and believed to carry messages from the spirit world.
Across Africa, the spotted hyena’s habitat is shrinking. As farms and roads cut through their territory, hyenas turn to hunting livestock, and farmers turn on them.
Snared, poisoned and shot in retaliation for livestock attacks, their numbers are falling outside of protected areas, despite a widespread range and a population numbering between 27,000 and 47,000 individuals.
For their three closest relatives — striped hyenas, the elusive brown hyenas and aardwolves — the decline is even more alarming.
They are often seen as dangerous pests and the IUCN’s Hyena Specialist Group has identified their negative reputation as a direct threat to their survival.
The fear of hyenas has deep roots. Humans and hyenas have competed for the same carcasses since our ancestors first started eating meat — at least 2.5 million years ago, Baynes-Rock says. He adds that modern culture has perpetuated that bias, as seen in Disney’s animation classic “The Lion King” and its portrayal of cackling, malicious packs of hyenas.
In Ethiopia, “people don’t just see hyenas through a single lens,” Baynes-Rock explains. “You can say an animal’s dangerous, but you can also see it as beneficial.”
Urban scavengers across the world — from raccoons and crows in North America to adjutant storks in India and Australia’s white ibises, dubbed “bin chickens” — are still seen as nuisance pests.
Yet many play crucial roles in our shared city ecosystems. “Apex” scavengers like hyenas and vultures are disproportionally persecuted because of their size and reputation, and their decline threatens human health globally.
“We create conditions for animals to be scavengers,” Baynes-Rock says. “But given a lack of human interference, they just do beautiful things in the environment.”
As his own research did, Yirga argues that to change the global reputation of urban scavengers we need to showcase their value: “through media, documentaries, school programs and in urban planning. Provide them a safe place.”
In Harar, the sprawl surrounding the walled old town continues to grow, blocking many of the routes and spaces hyenas use, and threatening the ancient coexistence.
Near the wasteland where Abbas feeds them, the government is capitalizing on the unique relationship, building an “eco-park” with shops and a museum where tourists can watch the feeding in a more controlled environment.
Yirga points out that excessive habituation to humans could make hyenas lose their natural wariness — increasing human and livestock attacks, and in turn, making them more vulnerable to retaliation.
Still, Abbas is not worried the tradition will end. “This feeding will transfer from generation to generation,” he says. “I am working to pass it on to my son in a beautiful way.”