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Description
Spotted hyena at the ZOOM Erlebniswelt Gelsenkirchen.

As you may know, hyenas are my fave animals, which means that I got a headache from some of the comments I heard while standing at the enclosure. It seems as if 90% of all visitors only know hyenas from The Lion King, and thus think that they're evil, smelly, disgusting and ugly, often saying that before even seeing the actual animal in the enclosure. The other 10% found them to be rather cute and not vicious at all. I find them to be highly interesting, being very similar to dogs in terms of appearance and behaviour, while actually being closely related to cats. And I think they're neat looking as well.

In a sense, the hyena today is where the wolf was perhaps 100 years ago. People have no real clue about them, and what they think they know comes from ghost stories and fairly tales. Even though we have Wikipedia. Oh well.

Description
Spotted hyena at the ZOOM Erlebniswelt Gelsenkirchen.

As you may know, hyenas are my fave animals, which means that I got a headache from some of the comments I heard while standing at the enclosure. It seems as if 90% of all visitors only know hyenas from The Lion King, and thus think that they're evil, smelly, disgusting and ugly, often saying that before even seeing the actual animal in the enclosure. The other 10% found them to be rather cute and not vicious at all. I find them to be highly interesting, being very similar to dogs in terms of appearance and behaviour, while actually being closely related to cats. And I think they're neat looking as well.

In a sense, the hyena today is where the wolf was perhaps 100 years ago. People have no real clue about them, and what they think they know comes from ghost stories and fairly tales. Even though we have Wikipedia. Oh well.