Petition: Nigeria’s Hyena Men Take Pups From the Wild Every Few Months. The Government Issues Them a Permit.

Every three or four months, the Gadawan Kura go into the bush. They come back with hyena pups, rock pythons, and baboons taken young enough to be trained. The animals are raised into a travelling show that moves between Kano, Abuja and Lagos, performing on roadsides and in markets while the men sell charms and traditional medicines to the crowd it draws.

The performances are documented in detail and have been for twenty years. Spotted hyenas, which have the strongest bite force of any mammal, are kept chained to the ground between shows and muzzled in public. The muzzle comes off for the finale, when a handler puts his head between the animal’s jaws. Baboons are dressed in football shirts and made to dance to drums, then sent through the crowd to collect money. Rock pythons live in boxes barely larger than they are.

What makes this a policy question rather than a cultural one is the paperwork. The hyena men operate under permits issued by the Nigerian government, and animal welfare organisations that have tried to intervene over the years have run into exactly that. The capture is licensed. The performances are licensed. There is nothing for anyone to enforce against.

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It is worth being careful about who this lands on. The Gadawan Kura are not wealthy. They are an extended family working an itinerant trade that has existed among the Hausa for generations, living on the edges of cities, and the animals are both their income and, by their own account, their household. One of the men has said they supply wild animals on request to zoos in Nigeria, Cameroon, Burkina Faso and Benin, which tells you the trade reaches considerably further than a roadside crowd. Treating the handlers as the whole problem would be both unfair and ineffective.

The permits are where the leverage is. A government that issues licences to capture and display wild hyenas, baboons and pythons is making a choice it could make differently, and it is the only party in this with the authority to change the arrangement. That means ending the licensing of wild-animal capture and street performance, and it means funding something for the families who currently depend on it, because a ban with nothing behind it moves the animals underground rather than out of chains.

Spotted hyenas are not domesticated and cannot be. They are large, intelligent, socially complex predators with a bite that crushes bone, kept on a chain by men who need them calm enough to work with and frightening enough to draw a crowd. That tension is the act. It is also the reason this cannot be made humane with better conditions.

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There is one more thing that keeps this going, and it is not in Nigeria. Tour operators sell visits to the Gadawan Kura as an itinerary item, bringing paying foreign visitors to watch the performances and photograph the animals. A practice that survives partly on outside money is one that outside pressure can actually reach. Our coverage of what captive animals need from the people responsible for them deals with household pets, and the principle does not change when the animal is a hyena: an animal kept for human purposes is owed something, and a chain in a shantytown is not it.

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