Spotted hyenas are highly intelligent social carnivores that face significant welfare challenges in captivity and increasing human-wildlife conflict in their African range states.
Spotted hyenas are among the most cognitively complex and socially sophisticated of African carnivores, yet they remain among the least protected and most persecuted. Their intelligence and social complexity make captive welfare particularly challenging: solitary housing, small enclosures, and lack of enrichment cause measurable psychological harm to animals capable of complex social cognition. Human-wildlife conflict killing is largely unmonitored and unregulated across most of their range, despite evidence that livestock protection measures can reduce retaliatory killing effectively.