No matter what you think and 100% really believe of Lycans alone, one does not realize that other were beasts do exist and some are more fearsome then others to behold.

I have made many friends around this world and met some very interesting individuals who tell me their tales of encounters with strange were beast in the black night. And too often they speak of the were hyenas that steal the dead from the graveyards.

I had in Marshall, Texas while growing Eugene Stanford a close friend who died a few years or so ago.

I mean to tell you her now the truth, that this was a very close friend who made household pets of a large female and male laughing hyenas (Spotted Hyena).

A hyena is considered a class one pet/animal and requires the proper permits and licenses to own one. The Hyena were aptly named "Ms. Giggles" and "Mr. Joker" and both were actually very affectionate towards me. They made me laugh and so did they when ever I came to visit them.

Many cultures, including those in Africa, have historically viewed the hyena negatively, associating them with gluttony, un cleanliness and cowardice. the are also associated with stealing babies in the night and small dogs and chickens.

Part of their overly blown well known bad reputation may stem from the hyena's tendency to actually scavenge through dark cemeteries in the night sniffing at the graves fresh and older for something to wet their appetites. This they do by stealing the recently and long dead corpse's for food.

The very real hunger and strange diversity of a unsavory diet of human and animal remains are a source of daily nourishment of the wild hyena. And it should be noted that this helps give it a very bad strange wild smell.

They are one of the few creatures naturally suited for this, due to their ability to devour and digest every part of a carcass, including bone. they are also blessed with a highly developed sense of smell and can smell something dead a mile or more away.

The word hyena is derived from the Greek hyaina, meaning "pig", and has a long association with cruelty, treachery and greed.

In Malawi, in the local language large hyenas reputed to be a man-eater were called lipwereri and the ordinary hyena was called a fisi. This full distinction in some raises the idea the the larger ones might be that of a man transfomed into one.

In a recent email someone told me of how as a child growing up in their country a werehyena stole his great grandmothers baby brother into the night. The babies mother told the authorities it was larger then a regular hyena and walked on it's back legs upright. He then wrote further to me expressing serious interest in discovering if he or his family were under the Hyena man curse for his new son was born with a birthmark that very much resembled a hyena. In the Borno State in Nigeria, it was and by some still traditionally believed that one or two of the villages in the region was populated entirely by werehyenas.

When sets out researching the Bouda, a spoken of as mythical tribe reputed to have a large population of men, woman and small children (who are so able in the blink of an eye), as reported to have the gift or magical power to transform themselves into hyenas. This many believe can and will happen day or night and on any given day and hour or second of the year.

The actual real belief in "Werehyenas" is so believed to be true within the traditional lore of the Bornu people of north-eastern Nigeria, that their language even contains a special word, bultungin, which translates as "I change myself into a hyena".

Those transformed into such hyena men and woman and children are said to be distinctively different in appearance from a normal hyena in the wild. They are always described as huge sometimes hairless except for a tuft of hair on the upper back. These night beasts are the hyenas that walk or stand on their back legs. Their large golden eyes glow red right before they attack, and they have a strange rotted corpse smell that alerts you that they are very near.

They also are known to bury their half dead victims alive and come back and feast upon them at their leisure.

Much of this I have gathered from the many emails and first hand meetings and phone conversations of those that have believed they know the old legends and myths or have stated that have seen or know of someone who has been attacked by one.

The haunting laughter-like calls of the Spotted Hyena inspired the idea in local cultures that they could imitate human voices and call their victims by name. Many believe that a werehyenas can imitate a human speaking voice and at times call out into the dark night the person they wish to devour.

As it is thought by many today, a real werehyenas might try to imitate a baby crying in the night, or call out your name pretending to be a lost friend or relative or stranger hurt by an accident in the darkness.

Hyenas are also associated with real curses, hexes and devil worship. With the use of black magic spells and strange sexual divinations to call up the dead are more then common.

The old tales tell if you place three hairs from the behind or hindquarters of a hyena and place them under your pillow the dead will come and speak to you directly. the ghosts will come to you by awakening from your slumbers to peer into your eyes and speak to you of the past and things to come face to face.

Real living hyena are sometimes used directly as a magic tool of demons and witches. In much of today's and past legends of African folklore, evil and good witches and great black magic practicing sorcerers are thought to ride hyenas through the night from town to town looking for souls and corpses to steal and hold hostage. Tales tell of them having the power to turn themselves into a great large hyena at will. The worse part of this belief is they too can turn the innocent by use of a old magic spell into these same foul creatures by stealing ones shadow and replacing it with that of a hyena's.

Early naturalists thought hyenas were hermaphrodites or commonly practiced homosexuality, largely due to the female Spotted Hyena's unique urogenital system. According to early writings such as Ovid's Metamorphoses and the Physiologus, the hyena continually changed its sex and nature from male to female and back again.

In Paedagogus, Clement of Alexandria noted that the hyena (along with the hare) was "quite obsessed with sexual intercourse." Many Europeans associated the hyena with sexual deformity, prostitution and deviant sexual behavior. Hyenas (usually "Laughing Hyenas") have been used in animated movies many times as well as having been rendered in live action films, commonly cast as hysterical and unhinged villains. Examples include Shenzi, Banzai and Ed from the Disney animated film The Lion King, Dick and Bo from Kimba the White Lion, one ball-playing individual in Bedknobs and Broomsticks, Harley Quinn's pets, Bud and Lou, and the laughing Hyena in Lady and the Tramp.

But until I grew into my studious years I did not fully know until I read that Hyenas can carry strains of rabies, but do not develop symptoms. Until U read an article in Scientific American :

The article goes on to say:

Intriguingly, when the researchers analyzed the rabies virus harbored by the hyenas, it turned out to be a strain genetically distinct from the one carried by the other carnivores. Exactly why the two strains exist in the same ecosystem is a mystery. Similarly, the question of why the hyena strain should be less virulent remains unclear. But the authors note that frequent exposure to small viral loads as a result of social contact among the hyenas might lead to a high degree of immunity

Bernhard Grzimek (1972) wrote that hand-raised hyenas can be friendly and playful if people spend enough time with them. Tame hyenas love to be petted and scratched. Grzimek wrote that the Dutch scientists Hans Kruuk and his wife raised one in their house and allowed it to run around freely, though it often wandered into the neighboring hotel and frightened guests. The Kruuks released it so it could live independently. One day the hyena opened the house door and playfully sprang at Mrs Kruuk as she was taking a bath.  

The striped hyena can be tamed and is said to become loyal and affectionate. Some hand-raised striped hyenas became very tame and dependent and were still tame at two years old and recognized the voices of their human friends at great distances. They loved playing with people.

The Israeli zoologist Heinrich Mendelssohn suggests that the tradition of the three monotheistic religions in the Near East to cover graves with tombstones possibly developed as a protection against desecration of graves by striped hyenas.

Grzimek (1972) wrote that aardwolves in the East London and Johannesburg zoos were tame and never attempted to attack their keepers, even when hungry.

Now I understand, respect and know what these wild dangerous animal were more then capable of doing to me also.

Pieter Hugo  ::  ‘Gadawan Kura’ – The Hyena Men
Series II, 2005-2007

‘The Dog’s Master’ Pieter Hugo These photographs came about after a friend emailed me an image taken on a cellphone through a car window in Lagos, Nigeria, which depicted a group of men walking down the street with a hyena in chains. http://davidmurodesign.com/blog/?p=155

Pieter Hugo
'Gadawan Kura' - The Hyena Men

Series II, 2005-2007

Please visit here now to view all of the series I (2005)

There are known to some around the world that clear and strong remember the old tales told to them as children. These might tell of strange monstrous men turned to beasts in the full moon light. Sorted deranged stories of huge half-man half beast creatures that are alive in many cultures and tales worldwide. Those of werewolves were-foxes, werecats, and even werebats and werefishes too.

Yes there are other great monsters of half man cursed species of were beast around the world. These flesh eating monsters that crawl, walk, fly or swim. These incarnate cursed evils that rule the shadows under a glowing huge full moon bright.

And as the moon new or old, waxing or waning sets or rises. Somewhere in the night as man becomes changed into an animal creatures so lustfully, prehistorically so savage. You might wonder what were creature is hiding in the black dark shadows under your bed.

Werehyenas

The true belief in a were-Hyena is certainly nothing to snicker or laugh out loud at unless you see a hyenaman flaunting it and running around naked except for it's latest flashiest boxer brief underwear.

Therianthropy refers to the metamorphosis of humans into other animals. from n. therianthrope and adj. therianthropic, part man and part beast, from the Greek theríon, θηρίον, meaning "wild animal" or "beast" (impliedly mammalian), and anthrōpos, άνθρωπος, meaning "human being") Therianthropes have long existed in mythology, appearing in ancient cave drawings such as the Sorcerer at Les Trois Frères. The term therianthropy was used to refer to animal transformation folklore of Asia and Europe as early as 1901.

Sometimes, "zoanthropy" is used instead of "therianthropy". Therianthropy was also used to describe spiritual belief in animal transformation in 1915and one source raises the possibility the term may have been used in the 16th century in criminal trials of suspected werewolves.

Al-Doumairy, in his Hawayan Al-Koubra (1406), wrote that hyenas were vampire creatures that attacked people at night and sucked the blood from their necks. Many still today will tell of a horrid smell right before a hyena attack. The diet of the hyena gives it a intense bad smell.

Arab folklorist tell how a hyenamen can mesmerize victims with their eyes or sometimes with their smell actually pheromones that often freezes a person in their tracks to be set upon by the were beast. the great muscular beasts are thought to roam the world freely. Tales of them attacking people or being described by those that have encountered them date through out history.

Many sightings of werehyenas have been reported through out the world and often in the USA, Uk China, France, Germany and all points in between.

One school of thought is that the lycan strain in movies of today and those in folklore originally was an offshoot of the Hyena men that crossed paths with the living.

A werehyenas is described as being very large. The body sometimes bald or covered with very strange coarse, short, bristly hair, brownish-gray in color, covers most of the werehyenas' body. Sometimes the coat is spotted or stripped. this depends on the local or species.

A shaggy mane grows high on the ridge of its muscular large neck.

This the werehyenas beast man animal appears to be humpbacked in most descriptions. Many note that the werehyenas hind legs are shorter than its front legs. It has long, erect round ears.

Its powerful cheek muscles give it a very rounded large head in appearance.

The huge mouth is filled with long white sharp (sometimes yellow), and flat teeth. Many report top have witnessed it with it's long tongue it clean it's whole face of a victims dried blood.

This the werehyenas beast is said to be able to stay in any chosen form it desires and only takes on human shape if it wishes when it so only desires.

5 Signs that someone you know is a Werehyana

1. A werehyenas in human form either casts no shadow or has the shadow of a hyena.

2. The living person who is so cursed by the evil that is a werehyenas has a foul breath that smells like a dead animal or person days old festering in the hot sun.

3. They bare the great mark of the night beast usually on their buttocks.

Often werehyenas they are born with a mark that resembles a hyena and usually become one at the point of puberty.

4. Domestic pets and wild animals react strangely in their presence. They fear them and run to hide rather then to become their next victim

5. They are known to have a large hunched back in human form. Extra long for arms and short legs. Men, woman and children who are so cursed might have dark or light spots of discolored skin pigment patches or strips on their buttocks, backs of legs, knees, arms and feet.

A Persian medical treatise written in 1376 tells how to cure people known as kaftar, who are said to be “half-man, half-hyena”, who had the common everyday reported habit of slaughtering and eating young animals, children and snatching infants from a screaming mothers arms.

The Greeks, until the end of the 19th century, believed that the bodies of werewolves, if not destroyed, would haunt battlefields as vampire giant immortal hyenas which drank the blood of the near dead or those dying out in the country side.

Werehyenas are by all accounts mythological or folkloric creatures. The belief as is other were creatures such as a werewolf a man is deemed or cursed to be capable of assuming the shape of hyenas.

They are present in the stories of several African and Eurasian cultures of people having encounters with such beasts who were either witches transforming themselves in to the evil beasts, or cursing someone to be doomed to be the beast forever.

Not so unlike like the ghastly werewolves of old and modern European folklore. These Hyenamen as they are said to be different in other ways and powers or strengths and weakness.

It is believed that werehyenas are often mischaracterized strangely and not just plainly depicted as lycanthrope shape shifters ruled by the moon, though unlike werewolves which are usually portrayed as being originally human, some werehyenas lore tells of how they can also be real or spirits of hyenas disguised as humans.

In Ethiopia, it is traditionally believed that every blacksmith, whose trade is hereditary, is really a wizard with the power to change into a hyena.

These blacksmith werehyenas are believed to rob graves at midnight and are referred to as bouda (also spelled buda). They are viewed with suspicion by most countrymen. Belief in the bouda is also present in Sudan, Tanzania and Morocco where the Berber people regard the bouda as a man who nightly turns into a hyena and resumes human shape at dawn. Many Ethiopian Christians characterize Ethiopian Jews as being bouda, accusing them of unearthing Christian corpses and consuming them; the commonality of blacksmithing as a traditional profession for Jewish men in Ethiopia may be a reason for the connection between the two beliefs.

In the folklore of western Sudanic peoples, a human-hyena hybrid creature is depicted as a cannibalistic monster who nightly transforms and terrorizes people, especially lovers. The creature is often portrayed to be a magically powerful healer, blacksmith, or woodcutter in its human form, recognizable through different signs such as a hairy body, red and gleaming eyes and a nasal voice.

Members of the Korè cult of the Bambara people in Mali “become” hyenas by imitating the animals behavior through masks and role plays. These are evocative of the hyenas' reviled habits, and may also be used to invoke fear among the participants into avoiding such habits and traits in their own lives.

The term "cynanthropy" was applied in 1901 to Chinese myths about humans turning into dogs, dogs becoming people, and sometimes even forcing a real sexual relations between humans and canines.

References

Clarke, James (1969). Man is the prey: an investigation into the motives and habits of man's natural enemies. p. 163. ISBN 233960872.

Woodward, Ian (1979). The Werewolf Delusion. p. 256. ISBN 0448231700.

Salamon, Hagar (1999). The Hyena People: Ethiopian Jews in Christian Ethiopia. ISBN 0520219015.

"The Magicality of the Hyena: Beliefs and Practices in West and South Asia". Asian Folklore Studies, Volume 57, 1998: 331–344. June 2008. http://www.nanzan-u.ac.jp/SHUBUNKEN/publications/afs/pdf/a1246.pdf. Retrieved 23.

Mounir R. Abi-Said (2006). Reviled as a grave robber: The ecology and conservation of striped hyaenas in the human dominated landscapes of Lebanon.

"The spotted hyena from Aristotle to the Lion King: reputation is everything - In the Company of Animals". Stephen E. Glickman. http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-17909878.html. Retrieved 2007-05-22.