Tajikistan’s Last, Lonely Hyenas

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1:25a few people associate with this part of the world, the striped hyena. So when I was given the chance to join the local conservationists working to save them, I jumped at it. This is what I found.

1:41We've driven along dusty, rutted tracks into the mountains, surrounded by this hot, arid landscape. There's very few trees here. There's a few pistachios, a few almonds. But otherwise it's these heavily grazed yellowing hills.

2:06OK, this is the first place a hyena was captured. Eight years ago, conservationist Ismail Kolmatov witnessed a near miracle when a striped hyena, long assumed extinct in Tajikistan, showed up on one of his motion-sensitive wildlife cameras. It says we were hopeless that we will find the hyena. Academia, local people, they kept saying that hyenas are extinct.

2:39So this discovery was a special moment. While checking maybe 50 ,000 or 60 ,000 pictures, there was it, and nobody could believe their eyes, and everybody cheered. Wow. So literally like looking for lost treasure.

3:01Ismoyl's discovery raises the tantalising prospect that one of Central Asia's rarest mammals, one with a crucial role in the ecosystem, might yet be saved. But here in the heat-hammered grasslands of southwestern Tajikistan, near the Afghan and Uzbek borders, the handful of remaining hyenas are in grave peril. I'm Antonia Bolingbroke-Kent, and for this week's Crossing Continents, I'm on the trail of Tajikistan-striped hyena, in an area where everyone and everything is struggling to survive.

3:38We are working with the less remaining population. And he says, for me as a conservationist, not doing anything is not an option. If they go extinct, I cannot live with the realisation that I didn't do anything to save them. By the way, the man translating is Mirzo Mirzoyev, Ismoyl's colleague at the Tajikistan Nature Foundation. Together, they're on a quest to rescue striped hyenas from oblivion here, but they've got their work cut out. Ismoyl, striped hyenas are very shy, and we will be extremely lucky to see one in the next few days. How many do you think are left in Tajikistan? It says it's really difficult to put a number, but in my opinion, there are around 20.

4:34Ismall and I are sitting back in the Tajikistan Nature Foundation's office in Dushanbe, the capital, and Ismoyle is about to show me that now infamous footage from 2017. It was the first photo of hyenas in the place where I show you. And it's a dog-like animal. It's got this dark-coloured mane, a dark muzzle and these huge ears and this lovely striped pelt. There could be as few as 5 ,000 of these animals left worldwide, scattered across North Africa, the Middle East, India and Central Asia. Unlike the spotted hyena, famous for its cackling bark, this striped variety is solitary and much less vocal.

5:21This is the first video, hyena's video. Ah, very, very tentatively and shyly coming out of its den. Oh, you can hear the hyena sniffing, You know, sniffing cautiously, thinking, is everything safe? On the rare occasion striped hyenas do vocalise, they're unlike anything I've ever heard. Such a strange sound.

5:57Ismail Mirzo and I are heading into the mountains in search of this mysterious and much misunderstood animal.

6:11Very, very few foreigners make it to this part of Tajikistan. This is a rare pocket of the country, which has fairly low altitude. We're only at about 800 meters above sea level here. Unlike most of the country, which sits above 3000 meters. It is brutally hot. I just can't imagine how people survive. historically this area had a greater fauna including predator such as Persian leopard now very few left here very very very few pain us we head into the hills is more at the wheel of a white four-wheel drive expertly navigating the deep ruts and near vertical drops mezo and I sit in the back, strapped in tight.

7:04Just dusty. Everything is just obliterated by dust. The air here is thick with locusts. There's a real locust problem. Central Asia is warming faster than the global average, with few regions hotter than these Tajik lowlands. Temperatures reach almost 50 degrees in summer here and nearly all the watercourses have dried up, the land scored by stony riverbeds. We drive through bare, grazed hills. Along with the searing heat has come greater human activity, mainly animal herding.

7:45Our base for the search is a compound of mudbrick houses surrounded by a rumple of hills. And after all the dust, there's a refreshing Tajik welcome. Traditionally, the first thing you do when you come to a village house is you wash your hands with this pot. An urn of cold water is being poured over my hands. Rahmat. And then we're taking our shoes off and going into Nazar, our host's house, which I can see. We're all going to sit on a lovely carpet. Get out of this heat. Rahmat, Rahmat. And Nazar has laid us out a feast.

8:27A wiry old man sporting a steel grey moustache and traditional toki hat, Nazar, who works as a forester, rather an anomaly given the dearth of trees here, recalls a time when wildlife was more abundant. He tells me he once saw hyenas almost every day.

8:48He says when he was a kid, there was wolf, foxes and even the leopard. also hyena. The story of the striped hyena here mirrors Tajikistan's turbulent recent history. During the Soviet period, these once forested lowlands were transformed into intensively cultivated collective farms, with hyenas, leopards, wolves, and even the last Caspian tigers hunted as pests. But after communism came something worse, civil war, the proliferation of guns, and famine.

9:26There was no control anymore, says Nazar. People arrived with Kalashnikovs and nobody could stop them. For them it didn't matter, he says. They'd come and shoot anything.

9:41He says now there is no area left without human presence. All the land is now allocated. there is basically no space for wildlife anymore. With no wilderness and little natural prey left, these days hyenas are forced to substitute their natural carrion diet with occasional thefts of livestock. When did you personally last see a hyena?

10:10He says I personally saw a hyena two years ago. But the shepherds, they encounter hyenas. Still? Still, yeah. And they consider hyenas as pests because hyenas take their livestock.

10:27The next morning, I head off to find out more about the herders whose trade now dominates this part of Tajikistan. And I'm in luck. There's a big market on the road that leads back to the capital. One of the distinctive things about this market isn't just the sight of all these animals and the hubbub and all the traders. It's also the air is thick with this pungent smell of sheep, fodder and dun. But for all the traders and shepherds here, this is the smell of big money.

11:01I meet Alim, an ethnic Uzbek shepherd with a wide gold-toothed smile, who reckons there's plenty of profit to be made here today. A ram, for instance, could fetch the equivalent of about 300 pounds, he says. Little wonder any wild animal thought to threaten these flocks will find itself unwelcome. Has a hyena ever tried to take one of your animals? Yes, he says. Once a hyena stole his crippled lamb. He says shepherds. If they see hyenas, they just beat it or try to kill it. Do you think people understand how rare hyenas are now, how few there are left?

11:53It says that a lot of people don't know hyena. Usually they try to kill it. It's because of lack of knowledge. Another trader had this story.

12:10He had about 280 sheep and goat. And late at night, about 2am, he suddenly decided to go and check on his livestock. And he started finding them with throats cut. And he said that it was a hyena. Was it a hyena? No. We know that it wasn't a hyena. Because a hyena doesn't do this. But this herder is convinced that it was a hyena. He has this bad image of the hyena. So there's a huge problem of misconception. A hyena is getting an undeservedly bad name in a lot of cases. Yeah, it looks like hyenas sometimes take the credit of the crimes they didn't do.

12:53Of course, when their natural food is depleted, hyenas take the last resort. They have no choice, but they don't usually do that. They know that if they attack livestock, they could be killed. People might set dogs on them or shoot them. That's Ismoyl again He adds that hyenas don't do half the things they're accused of Much of their wrongdoing is pure myth One reason for this bad reputation is that hyenas feed on dead animals On carrion People think they take human corpses too from graveyards But that's impossible because hyenas can't dig I think a really big part of why they're unpopular is because they're an odd-looking animal.

13:43We find it very easy to connect emotionally with beautiful, charismatic animals like snow leopards or tigers, but the poor hyena who's not so attractive. He thinks differently. For him, hyena is quite pretty. Ismoyl goes further. Scavengers like the striped hyena might be despised and misunderstood, but he argues that they're actually crucial to both the environment and human health.

14:19When a sick animal dies, the hyena eats its body, and this means he's cleaning the environment. If there were no such scavengers, infectious microorganisms would spread more widely. But these organisms can't survive in the hyena's stomach because the concentration of acid there is so high. So the hyena's eliminating bacteria, which spread diseases.

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16:19Loss of habitat, dwindling food supplies, a warming climate, misunderstandings and myths. The striped hyena is really up against it. But what happened next on our search for this elusive mammal showed how hard it is for any wildlife here. As we travelled across the hills, we happened upon 28-year-old shepherd, Jamil Nazar, and stopped to ask him what he thought about hyenas. He didn't have much to say on the subject, but then... He's going to show us why, though. He caught. He caught? OK. Jamil Nazar led us to an adobe compound with a wall about as high as a man. A number of youngsters were tugging on a rope draped over the top of it.

17:02Suddenly... Oh, no! That's really cruel. The scaly pink tail of a large animal appeared. Oh. They're just showing us an animal they've caught and it's a... It's called a giant monitor. It's a lizard. It's a giant monitor lizard and his brother has got it on a long rope tied over its back legs. It's a very bad thing to do, but this is how people treat wildlife here. So Jamil Nizar, why has he caught it? He says, we just decided to bring it to entertain the kids. Several young children, no more than five years old, were pulling the three-foot-long monitor backwards through the dust, cracking the rope like a whip.

17:47It's hissing. The poor animal is clearly very distressed. They're filming it on their phones and, oh no, it's really upsetting to see, actually. The family told us that these giant lizards, in fact a Caspian monitor endangered in Tajikistan, harm cows by suckling on their udders. It's not true. Finally, though, a breakthrough. They agreed to give it to us as a present. Oh, my God. We released the Caspian Monitor a few miles away, using scissors from our first aid kit to cut away the tight nylon rope and watched it limp away into the bush. It's really difficult to initiate conservation of a species in a region where people are struggling themselves.

18:34That's Mirzo again. They're just struggling to survive in the face of lack of water, lack of sanitation, in some cases poverty. When we speak about conservation, people don't really relate to it. At times, with so many challenges to his mission, Ismoyl almost lost heart. There were so few hyenas left, and so many people who just couldn't see the point in helping them.

19:09There have been some really difficult times because not everyone understands. Sometimes even people who advocate for wildlife, when we mention the hyena, they'd say, why do we need them? Meanwhile, locals weren't interested, so what can you do? I thought, why should I do this all on my own? I mean, one person can only do so much. and to preserve an entire species. It's just not enough.

19:44Yet Ismoyl has persevered, against the odds. Today he's setting fresh camera traps, hoping to find more evidence that his beloved striped hyena is still going too.

19:59So Ismoyl has decided to set the camera trap here because it's the point where these two paths meet so you've got the best chance of catching anything that's using either of the paths and he's rearranging a whole pile of rocks building a sort of set for the camera trap you think that's okay Ismoyl? I think it's okay but we need to test Then, Mirzo and I noticed something exciting nearby. So Mirzo and I are just squashing down by the edge of this trickle of water, and you can see the print of what could be a shepherd's dog. It's not big enough for a wolf, is it? No, no, it's not a wolf. What does Ismail think?

20:43Well, he's sure that this is not a wolf, so it's potentially a hyena. It's a long shot, but I'm starting to understand what drives Mirzo and Ismoyle to continue their search. If we see just one hyena, it'll all be worthwhile. But the more you get to know about this shy, persecuted animal, the more hopeless its plight seems. Back at base, Mirzo reveals yet another challenge to its survival. The striped hyena cubs are exported as exotic pets, and some hyena parts are used as aphrodisiacs. We found many advertisements online. Like what did you find? Look at this one. It's alarmingly easy to buy striped hyena parts, as Mirzo demonstrates.

21:35Is that an Instagram post? Yeah, I think it's teeth. Oh, they're the teeth for sale? Here, for example, in Russian language, there is a... Hyena musk? Yeah, it's a substance prepared from the hyena musk. And that's sold as an aphrodisiac? Yes. And here we can see a report from the organisation called Trafik, where it was documented that hyena skin was also salt. Gosh, so skins, teeth, glands, cubs. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. That's just what we could find with our limited skills. Striped hyena parts have been used as charms, medicines and aphrodisiacs for centuries, with spells and beliefs carried along the veins of the old Silk Road.

22:19Until recently, in neighbouring Afghanistan, some mullahs would wear a female hyena's vulva under their armpit, and it was said that any man who looked through it at the woman he desired would win her affection. It's curious that the hyena is both a curse and sometimes a blessing, though in each case to its own detriment. One of the things we are trying to do is to uplist the striped hyena from Appendix 3 to Appendix 1 of the CITES convention. which is the convention about regulating the trade of wildlife parts. To help save this often overlooked species, Tajikistan is pushing for it to be recategorised and given stricter global protections.

23:00Appendix 1 puts it on a strict regulation. So really putting them on the radar of the authorities? Yes. I think it's really interesting that it is Tajikistan which is initiating this global conservation effort. It's not Saudi Arabia or some African country where the striped hyena stronghold is. And I think when the voice to conserve the striped hyena is coming from the country which nobody expects would come, I think that draws attention.