Malawi man killed by hyenas heralds new horror in human/elephant conflict zone

Zambian farmers display the body of a goat that was snatched by a hyena. Men from the village pursued the hyena into Kasungu National Park and retrieved it. (Photo: Ed Stoddard)

By Ed Stoddard

25 Sep 2024

The killing of a Malawian man by hyenas near Kasungu National Park, in an area that has become a flashpoint of human/wildlife conflict since a botched elephant translocation, raises a chilling question: Are hyenas trailing the elephants, adding a new element of horror to a landscape of fear?

On the night of 6 August, Simon Chirwa, 31, was walking back to his village in Malawi when the hyenas struck.

It seems he may have had a drink or two after being paid for a piece job at a mill some distance from his village, and so he was perhaps staggering and attracting unwanted attention. Or maybe he passed out, making him easy prey: that is the tragedy of many men in Africa who fall victim to predators.

Chirwa was disembowelled by at least two hyenas. Seeking nutrient-rich organs such as the liver, his remains – according to Mike Labuschagne, the head of the Warm Heart NGO that recorded the incident – bore the bone-chilling marks of such an attack.

“The wounds are typical of an attack by two hyenas. The victim is anchored by a limb by one hyena and then castrated or disembowelled by the second hyena,” Labuschagne, who examined photos of the victim, wrote in a report on the incident which Warm Heart shared with Daily Maverick.

This mirrors the clinical predation of orcas on white sharks for their livers in what marine scientists have termed a “seascape of fear” that may explain the sharks’ movement out of Western Cape waters.

Elephant spoor in Zambian crop fields near Kasungu National Park. (Photo: Ed Stoddard)

In this terrestrial case, hyenas may herald a new horror in a “landscape of fear” for humans, unleashed by the botched translocation of 263 elephants to Kasungu National Park in Malawi in 2022 from Liwonde National Park in the country’s south.

Read more: How a botched elephant translocation in Malawi unleashed a landscape of fear and loathing

But unlike white sharks, the humans – overwhelming subsistence farmers who are among the planet’s poorest people – have nowhere to go.

At least nine people in Malawi and Zambia – which border the park along a pointedly unfenced boundary – have been killed by elephants since the translocation project that was spearheaded by the International Fund for Animal Welfare and African Parks, in cooperation with the Malawian government.

Another person has been killed by a hippo reportedly displaced by the elephants. And yet another was allegedly killed by rangers while foraging in the park for sustenance after elephants destroyed his family’s crops.

And now, as this correspondent sadly predicted in a report from the conflict zone published in July, hyenas have killed at least one person near the park. Chirwa met his grisly end almost 12km from the park boundary, and the topography in the area, and lack of cover, strongly suggest that the predators came from Kasungu.

This brings to 11 the number of people killed by wild animals since the translocation — which was transparently ill-conceived — took place.

Warm Heart has been painstakingly tracing the tracks of this travesty.

The NGO has also recorded over 11,000 victims on both sides of the border who have suffered crop or property damage, as well as those who lost loved ones and household breadwinners to the elephants. It estimates that over $3-million worth of damage has been inflicted on subsistence farmers reeling from a scorching drought this year triggered by the El Niño weather pattern.

A Warm Heart investigator happened to stumble upon Chirwa’s fate as he was gathering information about the latest spate of elephant actions in the area, which saw the pachyderms smashing the brick homes of small-scale farmers for the grain stored inside.

The investigator interviewed people in the area and the victim’s family.

Brighton Kumchedwa, the director of Malawi’s Department of National Parks and Wildlife, confirmed to Daily Maverick that the hyena incident occurred.

Perceptions of predation

When I was in the area in late June, I found that one of the perceptions among the rural people was that hyena incursions into their fields and attacks on livestock have increased since the elephant invasions began.

elephant damage The Zambian side of Kasungu National Park in the Lundazi District of Zambia. There is cultivation right up to the edge of the park which is marked by a tree line. A lack of fencing allows elephants and hyenas to move freely. (Photo: Ed Stoddard)

One theory advanced by Warm Heart’s Labuschagne – based on his experiences in anti-poaching operations in Malawi and the unfolding carnage around Kasungu – is that hyenas and other species such as bush pigs and jackals are taking advantage of the chaos created by the elephants among crops to launch their own incursions into agricultural settlements.

Another is the issue of scent, which takes us into the Umwelt of the hyena. It’s a German scientific term coined over a century ago and recently popularised by the natural history writer Ed Yong in his insightful book, An Immense World: How Animal Sense Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us.

Umwelt refers to an animal’s perceptual world which is often hidden to humans.

The smell of humans can, in Labuschagne's view, be a powerful deterrent to hyenas – an invisible (to humans) wall of protection for both people and their livestock. But elephants also have an extremely strong scent that even humans can detect.

“When elephants invade areas of human habitation, their scent is clear and obvious to hyenas and jackals and especially vagrant hyenas. Those vagrants not embedded in a clan will risk going into communal areas covered by the scent of elephants,” Labuschagne told Daily Maverick.

“Those vagrant, marginalised, hungry hyenas find the reward of pigs and goats that are astonishingly fat, calorific, tasty and very easy to catch compared to the available prey to vagrant hyena.”

Labuschagne is drawing on his observations of similar trends in the past from his anti-poaching work in Malawi.

“In the communities outside the southeastern boundaries of Liwonde National Park, close to where I was living, there was an upsurge in elephant raids on crops and houses in 1999. This was followed by an upsurge in human/hyena conflict, with seven people being bitten or killed,” Labuschagne writes in his report on the hyena incident last month.

The same pattern emerged around Kasungu in 2019, with a spike in human/elephant conflict near an unfenced boundary with the park coinciding with a surge in conflict with hyena, bush pig and jackal. Labuschagne was a Kasungu ranger at the time and commissioned a study.

“The study team only spent five days in the field and it certainly was not an exhaustive study. Nevertheless, it was found that 18 pigs and goats were killed by hyena during the year and 13 chickens were killed by jackal. The communities reported that a rise in hyena and jackal attacks were associated with the spike in elephant invasions,” Labuschagne wrote.

And the pattern seems to be repeating itself again, this time as a result of the 2022 elephant translocation. Labuschagne says that while Warm Heart has focused its attention on compiling data on human/elephant conflict, its investigators have reported an increase in hyena, jackal and bush pig attacks and incursions.

“Spotted hyenas are highly opportunistic and smart. It is entirely plausible that they have changed their behaviour patterns based on the presence of elephants,” Adam Hart, a conservation scientist at the University of Gloucestershire in the UK and an expert on human-wildlife conflict, told Daily Maverick.

“However, with human-wildlife conflict it is often the perception that matters as much or more than the data,” Hart said.

Such perceptions could also stem from the fact that the stakes have been dramatically raised, along with the levels of hunger in the region. The loss of a goat when your crop, already stunted by drought, has been damaged or destroyed by elephants is far more painful than would be the case if the harvest was bountiful.

As I previously reported, when I was around Kasungu I witnessed young Zambian men armed with an axe and sticks pursue hyenas into the park at night to retrieve a snatched goat. They returned with the disembowelled carcass after doing battle with the carnivores, a nocturnal drama that underscored the sheer desperation of their circumstances.

dead goat Zambian farmers hold up the remains of a goat that was snatched by a hyena. Men from the village pursued the hyena into Kasungu National Park and retrieved the carcass on 27 June 2024. (Photo: Ed Stoddard)

Another possibility is that the El Niño drought is among the reasons why elephants and hyenas have both gone beyond the park’s boundaries into agricultural lands. Herbivores and carnivores alike will move in response to drought in search of food and water. And in this case, it could give rise to the perception that hyenas have been trailing the pachyderms.

“It’s highly possible that the drought is the main driver of these behaviours for both elephants and hyenas – in many contexts there are more conflicts during drier periods due to wildlife wanting to access easier resources. And of course, hyenas are very intelligent, so if they discover once that there may be easy prey, they will likely return for more,” Christine Wilkinson, a conservation ecologist and hyena expert at the University of California Berkeley, said by email.

She also noted that the interactions between species when animals are translocated remain largely unexplored scientific terrain.

“Introducing <200 elephants to a region is not trivial and there has been very little research on what happens to range shifts, inter- and intra-specific interactions, etc., following the translocation of animals into new locations. This is actually a major gap for conservation planning globally. It’s hard to say what cascading impacts this major reintroduction could have had on the surrounding ecological community, including the hyenas,” Wilkinson said.

Malawi Parks’ Kumchedwa told Daily Maverick that he was unaware of any links between hyena and elephant movements, adding that there was “no evidence” that the drought was playing a role in the movement of animals out of the park.

Carnage and learning curves

Meanwhile, the carnage wreaked by the Kasungu elephants continues. Warm Heart has been documenting incursions and attacks on an almost daily basis.

But no one has been killed by an elephant in the area since November last year. This could suggest that in this landscape of fear and loathing, the local people have imbued some tough lessons through a steep learning curve.

No one in the area had ever laid eyes on an elephant before the 2022 translocation and so the local farmers had absolutely no idea how to react to the sudden and menacing presence of the pachyderms.

“If the Zambians and Malawians have never had to deal with crop-raiding elephants before, it is unlikely they would know how to mitigate crop-raiding. It would also compound injuries and deaths if they do not know how to behave around elephants in the bush,” Lynn Von Hagen, Regional Conservation Director for Africa with the Denver Zoo Conservation Alliance, told Daily Maverick by email.

“Often people chase them or throw stones, which can cause them to become aggressive. Elephants don’t like surprises, so remaining calm and quiet and backing away (and staying downwind) is the usual recommendation if coming upon elephants by chance. Defending farms from elephant incursions (especially in the dead of night) is so dangerous,” said Von Hagen, whose research is focused on human/elephant conflict in Kenya.

The rhythms of daily life in the region have been shattered. As I previously reported, people are afraid to walk in the dark, as they once did, and have in many cases been reduced to the indignity of urinating in buckets at night inside their houses, which lack indoor plumbing.

This shift in nighttime behaviour could help explain why there has been no recording yet this year of a fatal elephant attack on a human. And since elephant attacks on homes and crops remain a regular occurrence, the decline in the human death toll suggests that people are learning through a baptism of fire how to adapt to this new threat.

It’s also been traumatic for the pachyderms, and Warm Heart has had reports of calves abandoned near villages, which would point to a herd in extreme stress or cow elephants being killed.

Human/wildlife conflict is not a zero-sum game. Often there are casualties on both sides.

Ultimately, a proper fence would be the best solution to contain elephants and hyenas within the park’s boundaries.

The fact that the translocation went ahead without such an obvious precaution underscores the point that the welfare of local people was never a consideration. This reinforces the view that Western animal welfare organisations working in Africa often seem to place more value on the lives of wild animals than on people.

It is sadly probably only a matter of time before another person in the area is killed by an elephant or hyenas.

Here’s a list of the people killed so far by wild animals around Kasungu since the relocation:

Malawi

Collings Chinsi (51) – killed by elephants on 12 July 2022.

Jackson Banda (31) – killed by elephants on 27 August 2023.

John Kayedzeka (31) – killed by elephants on 17 September 2022.

Josephi Kapalamula (27) – killed by elephants on 12 July 2022.

Masiye Banda (31) – killed by elephants on 28 July 2023.

Bornface Nkhoma (53) – killed by elephants on 5 September 2023.

Simon Chirwa (31) – killed and partly eaten by hyenas on 6 August 2024.

Zambia

Andrew Phiri (65) – killed by elephants on 23 February 2023.

Elias Ng’uni (53) – killed by elephants on 9 September 2023.

Augustine Kumanga (78) – died of trauma on 4 November 2023 after being injured twice in elephant attacks.

Michael Zulu (35) – killed on 24 September 2022 by a hippo displaced by elephants. DM

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