As you know the “creature flap” that occured near Richmond Indiana in 1948 included the report of a “hyena-like” creature seen on a road the year before. It was described as a “strange vicious-looking thing”. Richmond is only about 50 miles from Delphos. Do you suppose there might be a tie-in between the Shunka Warak’in and the animal seen on that Indiana road years later? Perhaps there is, or was, a small surviving remnant of these creatures?

After sasquatch, phantom cats, and phantom kangaroos, this cryptid is QUICKLY becoming one of my favorites…

These people were farmers and lived close to the land. Then, much more than now, rural people supplemented their diets with game and wild plants. They would have been very familiar with the native wildlife of their area, and would have recognized a native animal, even a rare one. If this was indeed a hyena, it was an escaped captive.

Traveling circuses, large and small, were very common at the turn of the last century, and all of them had menageries. There were also nomadic families who traveled with small menageries. In that age before television, circuses were extremely popular entertainment. Traveling methods and animal confinement facilities were primitive compared to today’s, and laws regulating the ownership and interstate transport of animals were practically nonexistent. Animal escapes probably occurred with some frequency.

Striped hyenas were fairly common in menageries during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Most of them came from India. That was a time when colonial expansion made a wide range of exotic animals available to circuses and zoos in the Western world. It was the heydey of the “bring ‘em back alive” era. In some social circles it was considered chic to have exotic “pets” or private menageries. That was common in England; not so much here. But if a local person had had a menagerie or even a pet hyena, a local farmer would have known about it.

That was a time when traveling shows that featured wild animals were commonplace, and wild animal pets were also very popular.

If an animal escaped from a traveling show, the owners would probably have tried to recapture it without involving local people. There’s no way to know for sure, but I’d guess that many escapes occurred and that most of the time the animals were recaptured without incident. (A local person reports seeing a strange animal. The animal’s owner hears of it & goes out with food. After a couple of days on its own the animal is all too glad to have some food & allows itself to be recaptured. But in the meantime the tale of its sighting becomes a local legend).

Of course, that doesn’t explain all of the out-of-place animal sightings. But I’d bet that scenario has happened many, many times over the years.