Berkeley’s Hyenas.

For over 30 years, U.C. Berkeley has maintained a hyena colony on campus up in the Berkeley hills. It is the only captive hyena colony in the world. Unfortunately, due to big cuts in federal science funding, U.C. Berkeley will be shutting down its hyena colony later this summer and will ship their hyenas to zoos and parks around the country. I have never seen the hyenas myself, but I have heard them. As you drive past the U.C. Berkeley botanical gardens, you can hear the hyenas howling and giggling. They make an eerie sound, and you can hear it at a considerable distance.

WORST APPLICATION EVER.

Did You See ‘The Lion King’?  A long time ago, I got a rental application for a house I owned on Shafter Avenue in Oakland from a group of 3 U.C. Berkeley graduate students. All 3 of them were involved in research at the U.C. Berkeley hyena project. One of the applicants told me that he was in charge of transportation. I asked him: “What do you mean by ‘transportation’? Do you ever bring hyenas home with you?” Now I know that sounds like a silly question. After all, it would be grossly irresponsible for anyone at U.C. Berkeley to let a grad student take a hyena home with him; however, I have known quite a few very smart and very well educated people in my life who were completely irresponsible. From my observations, it appears that there is absolutely no correlation between education and a sense of personal responsibility. Anyway, this guy didn’t answer my question and changed the subject, which made me suspicious. I am always suspicious whenever applicants give me evasive answers to my questions. Since this guy was not going to answer my question and was beginning to look annoyed, I decided to ask a different question.
hyenas
The Lion King.
I said: “Aren’t hyenas dangerous?” The guy said: “Did you ever see ‘The Lion King’?” I said: “Yes, I did. I liked that movie.” He said: “Well, everyone who has seen ‘The Lion King’ has a very negative impression of hyenas.” I said: “Yes. The hyenas in ‘The Lion King’ were evil, but they were just cartoon characters. I know that. However, that doesn’t answer my question. What I want to know is this. Aren’t hyenas dangerous, and do you ever bring them home with you?” The guy changed the subject again. He told me how hyenas organize their society and raise their young. He showed me pictures of his hyenas. I learned a lot of interesting things about hyenas. For example, I learned that a hyena can eat 30 pounds of raw meat in 10 minutes. However, that wasn’t what I want to know. What I wanted to know was whether this guy was planning to bring wild, vicious, carnivorous animals onto my property.

Hyenas Are Good For You. My applicant also told me that “hyenas are good for people.” He said that hyenas control the spread of disease by picking off and eating sick animals before they can infect other animals and humans. That sounds believable to me, and while that may work very well in the jungles of Africa, there was an obvious flaw in his guy’s logic that he did not see. Here in the United States, we do not control the spread of contagious diseases that way. For example, when someone is admitted to Kaiser Hospital with a contagious disease, like tuberculosis for instance, the doctors there don’t prevent that person from infecting others by putting him in a sealed room with a pack of hungry hyenas and let the hyenas devour him.

I learned a long time ago that the owners of exotic and dangerous animals are very defensive about their pets, and that it’s best not to argue with them about it. Although these hyenas were not pets, these grad students were talking and thinking about them as those they were. I rejected this application and rented the house to a young couple with 2 cats.

Disney World. It looks like some of U.C. Berkeley’s hyenas will be going to Disney’s Animal Kingdom in Orlando. That will be ironic. When Disney made ‘The Lion King’, animators from Disney studios came to Berkeley and spent a good deal of time here studying and making drawings of the hyenas here. The hyenas in ‘The Lion King’ were based on those drawings of Berkeley’s hyenas.