Spotted hyenas are highly intelligent, socially complex carnivores whose welfare is tied to clan stability and territory integrity, both threatened by human expansion and retaliatory killing.
Spotted hyenas experience rich social lives built on decades of established relationships within their clans. Retaliatory killing that removes clan members disrupts the social fabric that hyenas depend on for cooperative hunting, pup defense, and territorial maintenance. Hyenas killed in snares or by poison experience acute suffering before death. The persistent cultural view of hyenas as malevolent scavengers contributes to indiscriminate persecution despite their ecological importance as apex predators and scavengers that clean disease from landscapes. Greater public understanding of hyena cognition and social complexity could reduce unnecessary killing.