The Spotted Hyena, aka the Laughing Hyena, both male and female genitals are strikingly similar.
Natural History, Pliny the Elder (A.D. 23-79) ab uno animali sepulchra erui inquisitione corporum.
It was more Jackals that were prone to digging bodies out of shallow graves and eating them. Robert Graves.White Goddess. The Jackals, sacred to Anubis, Guardian of the Dead, because they fed on corpse like flesh and had mysterious nocturnal habits.
The Hyena is of feline descent.
Hyenas were hermaphrodites, bearing both male and female organs, Aristotle declared in the Historia animalium: “this is untrue.”
Medieval bestiaries drew a moral lesson from the depravity of beasts, excluded from Noah’s ark in 1614, God had only saved the purely bred, Hyenas were reconstituted after the flood through the unnatural union of a dog and cat.
Female hyenas virtually indistinguishable from males, their clitoris enlarged and extended to form an organ of the same size, shape, and position as the male penis, can also be erected.
High foetal androgen levels responsible for male sexual facies in adult female Spotted Hyenas.
An unfair stereotype of Hyenas, in reality fascinating, intelligent even beautiful creatures.
Disney animators sketches for The Lion King, the trio of Hyenas in the Movie reinforce the common stereotype of Hyenas as cowardly, skulking low-lifes.
Ernest Hemingway, Fisi, the Hyena, hermaphroditic self-eating devourer of the dead, trailer of calving cows, ham-stringer, potential biter-off of your face at night while you slept, sad yowler, camp-follower, stinking, foul, with jaws that crack the bones the lion leaves, belly dragging, loping away on the brown plain.
“Hyenas” Movie, an urban legend account of human encounters and attacks by a sub-culture of predatory Cryptohuman Hyenas. Shape-shifting human-like creatures prowl the rural back roads and forests of North America, thought to exist by Cryptozoologists.
Folklore and sightings persist even as mainstream science denies their existence.
Rudyard Kipling, The wise Hyenas come out at eve to take account of our dead,… they know the dead are safer meat than the weakest thing alive… and tug the corpse to light, the pitiful face is shown again, an instant ere they close in.
UK Teaching. Resources TES. Edwin Morgan enters the mind of the Hyena. English National 5 Poetry. He describes its patient, menacing personality: Morgan adopts the persona of a Hyena, I sing and am the slave of darkness, my place is to pick you clean and leave your bones to the wind.
A hunters’ poem from Lesotho, description shifts to the first person singular to give the Hyena’s own words, I growl being a poor body, I am small, I am hunched up like the elephant… Hyena of the Mmankala of Kone-land, a group whose symbol is the Hyena, when it says ngou! it devours even man.
A Yoruba hunting poem the Hyena is regarded as the ultimate scavenger, there being nothing it won’t eat: oral poetry from Africa, Hyena, who is there when the mourner buries the corpse eats fat and bone, scabbard and hide.
Spotted Hyena, strongest jaws in proportion to body size across the entire mammal kingdom, cunning hunting tactics, nocturnal nature, nefarious reputations, frontal cortex of their brains, thought to regulate social intelligence.
The largest of the other three species: Brown, Striped and Aardwolf, Spotted Hyenas are among Africa’s most vocal animals.
Robin Ouzman Hislop, born UK, a reader in philosophy & religions, has travelled extensively throughout his lifetime but now lives in semi- retirement as a TEFL teacher and translator in Spain & the UK.
Robin was editor of the 12 year running on-line monthly poetry journal Poetry Life and Times. In 2013 he joined with Dave Jackson as co-editor at Artvilla.com, where he presently edits Poetry Life & Times, Artvilla.com, Motherbird.com.
He’s been previously published in a variety of international magazines, later publications including Voices without Borders Volume 1 (USA), Cold Mountain Review (Appalachian University, N. Carolina), The Poetic Bond Volumes (thepoeticbond.com) and Phoenix Rising from the Ashes (a recently published international Anthology of Sonnets). His last publication is a volume of collected poems All the Babble of the Souk available at all main online tributaries
goodreads.com/author/show/Robin Ouzman Hislop
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http://www.amazon.com. All the Babble of the Souk. Robin Ouzman Hislop
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https://www.amazon.com/author/robinouzmanhislop
http://www.innerchildpress.com/robin-ouzman-hislop.All the Babble of the Souk