Ethiopian hyena tamer hopes to grow spectacle into circus

By Addis Getachew

HARAR, Ethiopia (AA) – Abassie Mummee Sani, 25, sits on a smooth piece of rock, feeding hyenas meat from a short, hard piece of wood.

On a humid March night, tourists flocked to the site where Abassie feeds his hyenas at a dusty spot outside Jugel, a walled township within the city of Harar in eastern Ethiopia that won accolades from UNICEF as a city of peace.

He passes his short stick he holds like a magic wand to anyone who wants to come close to sit beside him and feed the hyenas -- beasts swarming about their master feeder giggling, heaving and taking bites in frequent turns as they hear their names called.

Abassie calls every hyena by name. He said he has as many as 50 under his command.

“Though they are famed as scavengers, they are also powerful hunters. Their bite is the strongest of any mammal, and they are tenacious enough that they have been observed warding lions away from food. They are opportunistic and their strong jaws allow them to eat every part of the animal, including bones and horns,” he said.

The foregoing is what one gets immediately looking for the character of hyenas on the internet and it is those beasts that Abassie is befriending with grace and ease.

- How it all began

Abassie recalls at the age of 7 and onwards, sitting beside his father watching attentively as he called the hyenas by name and feed them leftover meat collected from butcheries.

“I understand the hyenas very well,” he told Anadolu Agency. “Like one knows the characters of his fellow men, I can tell the hyenas apart by their characters; I understand their individual behaviors.”

But recently he took a bold step to domesticate hyenas, but failed.

“I took a baby hyena, kept it on the premises of my home and fed it just like one keeps a dog,” he said. “But, unfortunately, it found its way out; I don’t know how it got out though.”

“Later, I found its tattered remains eaten by other hyenas that must have felt envious of the young hyena I had fed in my house. And it must have smelt human to the other hyenas,” he said, adding hyenas are smell experts.

Hyenas in Harar, he said, used to attack humans. “My dad started to befriend them and feed them.”

“Hyenas in the area used to exhume human corpses out of their graves and eat them,” he said, adding his father was inspired by the urge to save people from being attacked by the ferocious, unpredictable beings.

The hyenas of Harar are light brown with black dots.

- Hyena circus

A fairly big amphitheater stood just beside the dusty ground where Abassie feeds his hyenas. “My father started with just three hyenas but after he passed on I took over and I have now in command of as many as 50 hyenas that came out from their dens every night.”

With lights beaming from tourists’ vehicles and tri-wheeled Bajaajs, the hyenas seem not to care about or agitated by more than a dozen local tourists who take pictures with their mobile phones as Abassie shouted the names one by one, feed, hug and play with them.

“The regional tourism bureau built this circus building and gave me,” he said. “In the future, I want to make it a hyena circus.”

“I will have to dress my hyenas with skirts to do my shows,” he said, indicating that the family business of feeding and taming hyenas was increasingly being scrutinized.

“People are encroaching on my circus turf on the pretext that they had permits to manufacture concrete blocks,” he said. “This is a tourist attraction area not to be violated in this manner.”