Hyenas are unpopular animals, reviled for their eerie calls and predilection for carrion. But when anthropologist Marcus Baynes-Rock traveled to the small Ethiopian town of Harar in 2009 to study the hyenas there, he found ones tame enough to be fed by hand.

What follows in Among the Bone Eaters is a probing look at the complex relationship between humans and wild animals. Baynes-Rock introduces us to the hyenas he meets (Tukwondilli, Baby, and Willi, to name a few) just as carefully and with as much attention to personality as he does his human acquaintances. By day, he interviews the residents of the town about local hyena legend. By night, he follows the hyenas, hanging out with them in their favored garbage patch or traversing the ancient city’s drainage lanes. Eventually, a few of the animals become so accustomed to his presence that he wrestles with them and endures their playful nips. 

Baynes-Rock’s immersive account is told with sharp-eyed, self-effacing prose, and he leaves nothing out—Ethiopia’s sluggish bureaucracy, the town’s maze-like geography, and even the Oromo woman he meets and eventually marries. It’s as much a travelogue as it is a research study. 

Baynes-Rock is an academic—he tends to slip into jargon and constantly references the philosopher Martin Buber. However, his final musings are fascinating. The hyenas he meets, coexisting with humans, may represent a rapidly approaching future where an animal’s “natural” environment no longer really exists. It’s “hyenas like those in Harar,” he writes, “who [stand] a chance of persisting beyond the boundaries of protected areas and zoos.”

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