Are Hyenas Dogs or Cats? The Hyena Family Explained

Where hyenas fit in the family tree

All meat-eating mammals in the order Carnivora fall into two big branches. The Caniformia, or dog-like carnivores, include dogs, wolves and foxes, bears, raccoons, weasels, badgers, skunks and seals. The Feliformia, or cat-like carnivores, include cats, mongooses, civets and genets, and hyenas.

Within the cat-like branch, genetic studies place the hyenas closest to the mongooses, such as the meerkat, and to the unusual carnivores of Madagascar. Hyenas are therefore more closely related to a house cat than to any dog, even though the two lines separated tens of millions of years ago.

The cat-like and dog-like branches split more than 40 million years ago. Hyenas themselves appear in the fossil record in Eurasia around 20 million years ago and later spread to Africa.

Why hyenas look like dogs

A spotted hyena trotting across the savanna looks a lot like a big, oddly built dog. That is because hyenas and dogs evolved similar answers to the same problem: finding and catching food on open ground.

Features they share include:

• Non-retractable claws. Like dogs, hyenas cannot pull their claws in, unlike most cats. Blunt claws give grip when running.
• Running on their toes over long distances. Both chase prey for kilometers rather than ambushing it like cats.
• Long muzzles and a keen sense of smell. Both find carcasses and prey by scent.
• Social life. Spotted hyenas, like wolves and African wild dogs, live and hunt in groups.

This is called convergent evolution: unrelated animals ending up similar because they live in similar ways. Dolphins and sharks, or bats and birds, are other well-known examples.

Cat-like clues in the hyena body

Under the skin, hyenas give away their true relatives. The clearest clue is in the skull. All living cat-like carnivores have a double-chambered bony capsule around the middle ear, divided by an internal wall; dog-like carnivores do not. Hyenas have the cat-like version.

Hyenas also share features of the teeth and skull base with other feliforms, and they have fewer teeth than dogs. Their scent-marking with anal glands resembles that of mongooses and civets. DNA studies confirm what anatomists found long ago.

Behavior can be misleading. Hyenas groom, play and greet each other in ways that may look dog-like, but those habits evolved independently.

The four living hyena species

The hyena family is one of the smallest in the Carnivora, with just four living species, each in its own genus.

The spotted hyena is the largest and most social. It lives in big clans run by females, hunts most of its food and is famous for its giggling calls, explained in Why do hyenas laugh?

The striped hyena is a mostly solitary scavenger with a shaggy coat, black stripes and a long mane it can raise to look bigger. It is the only hyena living outside Africa today, ranging into the Middle East, the Caucasus and India.

The brown hyena of southern Africa has a long, dark, shaggy coat. It feeds mainly on carrion, and on the Namib coast it scavenges along the shore, which earned it the name strandwolf.

The aardwolf is the odd one out. It weighs only about 7–10 kg (15–22 lb), has small, peg-like cheek teeth and eats almost nothing but termites, lapping up very large numbers in a single night with its broad, sticky tongue.

Hyenas of the past

Hyenas were once far more varied. In the Miocene, many dog-like hyena species roamed Eurasia and Africa, some light-bodied runners and others more like civets. As true dogs spread from North America into the Old World, many of those dog-like hyenas died out, while the heavy, bone-cracking types survived.

During the Ice Age, cave hyenas, which most scientists now treat as populations of the spotted hyena, lived across Europe, from Britain and Spain to Russia. A giant, bone-crushing relative, Pachycrocuta, lived in Eurasia and Africa earlier in the Pleistocene and may have weighed well over 100 kg (220 lb).

So, dog or cat?

If you have to pick, a hyena is closer to a cat. Scientifically, though, the best answer is “neither”: hyenas are their own distinct family with a long and separate history. They are a reminder that looks can be deceptive, and that similar lifestyles can produce similar bodies in animals that are not closely related at all.