"... the hyena disturbed the family's dinner guests by crunching one of the guinea pigs"

This is the Reverend Dr William Buckland ...

He was a Church of England priest and his doctorate was in Divinity.  He was also made Reader in Mineralogy and Geology at Oxford in 1815.  Beyond that he was the kind of all-out eccentric that you can't help but be fascinated by the moment you start reading about them.  Deeply inspired by the new thinking from France that rocks might contain extinct species of plants and animals he went on to become one of the great investigators of the past.  His house was filled with rocks, fossils and a menagerie of animals, he used the vertebrae of long-extinct reptiles as candle holders, and he owned a pet hyena, Billy, who had a habit of eating of upsetting Buckland's dinner guests by chomping the guinea pigs that roamed the house.  Not that this would have disturbed Buckland himself too much, given that the Reverend had set himself the goal of eating every species of creature on earth.  At one dinner, after his host showed off what was alleged to be the desiccated heart of Louis XIV, Buckland is supposed to have wolfed it down, saying "I have eaten many strange things before but never the heart of a king".  To cap it all, Buckland had a pet bear called Tiglath Pilesar, which he would sometimes take along to academic dos dressed in a student's cap and gown.  Though whether this was because of his high opinion of the bear or a low opinion of his students, none of the sources I've looked at say.