Tajikistan’s last, lonely hyenas

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 12 August 2025

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

For decades, conservationists in Tajikistan assumed that the striped hyena – a shy, less vocal cousin of the spotted hyena – was extinct there. But in 2017 a motion-sensitive camera trap in the country’s south-western corner, near the borders with Afghanistan and Uzbekistan, detected the presence of a female with cubs. The discovery stunned local observers, and ever since, one man and his colleagues have struggled to find out more about the few remaining Tajik striped hyenas with a view to saving them from oblivion. The challenges are immense, including the international animal parts trade, competition between animals and humans for habitat, and often-negative public perceptions of the hyena itself. Eight years on, Antonia Bolingbroke-Kent travels to the grassy lowlands of Tajikistan to join the small team in their fight to save these elusive, persecuted mammals, and in doing so learns how vital hyenas are to both the ecosystem and human health.

This episode of The Documentary comes to you from Assignment, investigations and journeys into the heart of global events.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service.
0:03.5	I'm Antonia Bollingbrook-Kent on Assignment in Tajikistan.
0:09.5	We've driven along of dusty, rutted tracks into the mountains, surrounded by this hot, arid landscape.
0:20.5	BBC World Service, welcome to assignment.
0:24.1	There's very few trees here.
0:25.7	There's a few pistachios, a few almonds.
0:28.8	But otherwise, it's these heavily grazed yellow in hills.
0:34.8	Okay, this is the first place a hyena was captured.
0:42.0	Eight years ago, conservationist Ismail Kolmatov witnessed a near miracle when a striped
0:47.7	hyena, long-assumed extinct in Tajikistan, showed up on one of his motion-sensitive
0:53.6	wildlife cameras.
0:57.4	We say we were hopeless that we will find the hyena.
1:02.8	Academia, local people, they kept saying that hyenas are extinct.
1:10.6	So this discovery was a special moment.
1:14.6	While checking maybe 50,000 or 60,000 pictures, there was it.
1:19.6	And nobody could believe their eyes and everybody cheered.
1:22.5	Wow.
1:25.7	So literally like looking for lost treasure.
1:28.8	Yeah, yeah.
1:31.7	Ismail's discovery raises the tantalizing prospect
1:35.1	that one of Central Asia's rarest mammals,
1:38.4	one with a crucial role in the ecosystem, might yet be saved.
	...

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