What a 1902 Zoo Cage Tells Us About Hyenas

The New-York Tribune for September 7, 1902, carried a notice about hyenas that would make any modern wildlife biologist wince. Whatever the paper said that day, it was almost certainly wrong in ways that persisted for another fifty years. Hyenas have always been victims of terrible PR. The problem starts with how they look. A hyena's front legs are longer and more muscular than its hind legs, which makes it slope downward toward the rear—a posture we read as sly, cowardly, broken. Humans added the rest: the laugh-like vocalization became a sign of hysteria; the teeth and jaws became evidence of savagery; the fact that they scavenge became proof they were too weak to hunt. Zoo visitors in 1902 saw exactly what they expected: a comic villain, something between a dog and a demon. What they actually saw was one of Africa's most effective predators. Hyenas hunt in coordinated packs. They can bite through bone—their bite force rivals a lion's—and their digestive system can process parts of a carcass that nothing else can touch. They have complex social hierarchies, with females outranking males in ways that still perplex researchers. They're clever enough to drag carcasses away from lions, bold enough to steal kills from animals three times their weight. But a hyena in a nineteenth-century zoo cage taught visitors none of this. It taught them to laugh at the animal, to assume its hunting strategy was desperation rather than efficiency, to mistake efficiency for cowardice. That gap between what hyenas actually are and what people believe about them hasn't narrowed much since 1902. The Tribune's readers went home with a story. A century later, most of us still believe it.