Honey Badger

The honey badger is a medium sized carnivore in the weasel family, Mustelidae, the same family as otters, martens, weasels and the wolverine. It is also known as the ratel, a name taken from Afrikaans that is still used in South Africa and in many other languages. Its scientific name, Mellivora capensis, means something like the honey eater from the Cape, because the first animal described for science, in 1776, came from the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa. The honey badger is the only living species in the genus Mellivora, and it sits in a subfamily of its own, Mellivorinae. About a dozen subspecies have been described from different parts of its huge range, including one from the deserts of Turkmenistan, but they differ mostly in size and in how much white or gray shows on the back. The name honey badger comes from its habit of breaking into beehives and from its badger like shape, low and heavy with short legs and long claws. People search for it under many names, from ratel to Indian badger or African badger, and in Spanish it is usually called ratel or tejón melero. In parts of its range it is also feared and admired as one of the boldest animals in the bush.

The honey badger is not really a badger. It looks like one and shares its low, heavy build and digging claws, but it is not a close relative of the animals usually called badgers. Badgers are a mixed group inside the weasel family: the European badger and the Asian badgers belong to one subfamily, the American badger to another, and the hog badger and the ferret badgers of Asia to others still. The honey badger has its own subfamily, and genetic studies place it closer to martens and the wolverine than to the European or American badger. There are clear differences you can see. A European badger has a white face with two black stripes, while the honey badger has a dark face and a single silver gray cape running down its back. The American badger is grayish brown with a white stripe on the head and lives only in North America, so there are no honey badgers in the Americas, and the American badger is sometimes mistaken for one. Honey badgers are also longer legged, faster and much more willing to face predators. In short, badger describes a shape and a lifestyle of digging rather than a single family tree, and the honey badger reached that shape on its own line.

A honey badger is about the size of a medium dog, but much lower and heavier for its length. It stands 23 to 28 cm (9 to 11 inches) at the shoulder, the body measures 55 to 77 cm (22 to 30 inches) and the tail adds another 12 to 30 cm (5 to 12 inches). Males are clearly bigger than females: in the Kalahari, adult males weigh around 9 to 16 kg (20 to 35 pounds) and females 5 to 10 kg (11 to 22 pounds), which makes it the largest land member of the weasel family in Africa. The coat is coarse and sparse. The legs and belly are black, while a wide band of silver gray or white runs from the top of the head down the back to the tail. Some forest animals in Central and West Africa are almost all black. The head is broad, the ears are tiny and can be closed, and the eyes are small. The front feet carry long, curved claws, up to about 4 cm (1.5 inches), perfect for digging and tearing wood, while the back claws are short. The teeth are strong and the jaws can crack a tortoise shell. Its skin is thick, especially around the neck, and so loose that the animal can turn inside it.

The honey badger's reputation rests on a few real features. The first is its skin. It is thick, especially on the neck and shoulders, and it hangs loosely on the body, so when a lion, leopard or dog grabs it, the badger can twist round inside its own skin and bite back. Bee stings, porcupine quills and many teeth have trouble getting through. The second is its tolerance to snake venom. In 2015, scientists found that honey badgers carry a small change in the muscle receptor that cobra venom attacks, the same kind of change that evolved separately in hedgehogs and pigs, and mongooses reached a similar result in another way. The change makes it harder for the toxin to lock on, so the badger can survive bites that would kill a dog of the same size. It is not full immunity: honey badgers have been seen collapsing after a puff adder or cobra bite, lying still for a while and then getting up and finishing the meal. Third, when threatened it rattles, growls and releases a strong smell from glands under the tail. Add sharp claws, strong jaws and a stubborn temper, and few predators find it worth the trouble. In 2002 the Guinness Book of Records called it the most fearless animal in the world.

The honey badger has one of the largest ranges of any carnivore. In Africa it lives almost everywhere south of the Sahara, from Senegal and Sudan to the Cape, and it reaches the Sahara itself in southern Morocco, Western Sahara, Mauritania and southwestern Algeria. It is missing only from the driest sand seas and the most densely farmed lands. From Africa its range continues across the Arabian Peninsula, through Israel, Jordan, Iraq and Iran, north into the deserts of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and southern Kazakhstan, and east through Pakistan into India and the lowlands of Nepal. Few animals handle such different places. It lives in savanna, dry woodland, thorn scrub, semi desert and true desert, on rocky hills and mountains up to about 4,000 meters (13,000 feet), and along the edges of tropical forest. It does best where the soil is easy to dig and prey is plentiful, but it also crosses farmland and shows up near camps and villages. It does not migrate, but males travel huge distances. In the southern Kalahari, a study by Colleen and Keith Begg found adult male home ranges of about 541 square kilometers (209 square miles) and female ranges of about 126, much larger than expected for an animal of its size.

Honey badgers eat a little of almost everything, but they are mainly hunters of small animals that they dig out of the ground. In the southern Kalahari, where their diet has been studied in detail by following them on foot, they ate mostly rodents such as gerbils and mice, lizards, scorpions, beetle larvae and other insects, and they switched between prey depending on the season and what was easy to find. Snakes are a regular part of the menu, including dangerous species such as Cape cobras and puff adders, and young pythons are taken too. In the Sahara, a 2020 study found that badgers there lived largely on spiny tailed lizards, digging them out of their burrows. Honey badgers also eat birds and their eggs, frogs, tortoises, small antelope lambs, porcupines raided in their dens, carrion, wild fruit and roots. Most of their prey is caught by digging: a badger can dig dozens of holes in a single night, and goshawks and jackals sometimes follow it to grab whatever escapes. In farmland they may raid chicken coops, which puts them in conflict with people. And then there are bees. Raids on wild and kept hives are the habit that made the animal famous.

Honey badgers really do eat honey, and that is where their name comes from, but honey is only part of the reward. When a honey badger finds a bees' nest in a hollow tree, a termite mound or a rock crevice, it tears it open with its front claws and eats the comb, the larvae and the honey together. The larvae, packed with protein and fat, are probably the main prize. Its thick skin and the smell from its tail glands help it put up with hundreds of stings, though badgers have been found dead from too many stings. A famous story says that the greater honeyguide, a small African bird, leads honey badgers to bees' nests and then eats the wax they leave behind. Honeyguides really do lead human honey hunters to hives, but a 2023 review of the evidence, which included interviews with 394 honey hunters in nine African countries, found no solid proof that they do the same with badgers. Well known film footage of the partnership turned out to be staged with a tame badger. Most hunters doubted it, though some in Tanzania said they had seen it. The badger's taste for hives also brings it into conflict with beekeepers. In South Africa, putting hives on stands at least a meter high, or strapping them shut, keeps badgers out without killing them.

Honey badgers are mostly nocturnal, but not always. In hot weather and near people, honey badgers tend to come out after dark, which is why most sightings happen on night drives. In cooler months and in quiet, protected areas they are often active during the day too, and in the Kalahari they were seen foraging at all hours depending on the temperature. A badger can stay on the move for many hours, trotting with a rolling gait and stopping to sniff and dig, and males can cover more than 25 km (15 miles) in a single night. They rest in burrows they dig themselves, or in holes made by aardvarks, springhares and other animals, and they use many different dens across their range. Honey badgers are mostly solitary. Adults meet to mate, and a mother and her cub travel together, but groups are rare, though young males sometimes move around in pairs. They keep in touch through scent, marking their range with smells from glands under the tail and using shared latrines. When threatened they make a rattling growl and may charge. They are also famously clever. Stoffel, a honey badger at the Moholoholo rehabilitation center in South Africa, became well known for opening gates, stacking objects and climbing walls to escape his enclosure again and again.

Honey badgers breed slowly for a carnivore. Females can give birth at any time of year, and after a pregnancy of roughly two months they usually have a single cub, rarely two. The cub is born blind and almost hairless, with pinkish gray skin, in a burrow lined with grass. For the first weeks the mother leaves it in the den while she forages, and she moves it often, sometimes every few days, to a new burrow, carrying it in her mouth. The cub's eyes open at about one month, and by around three months it starts to follow her on foraging trips. It then spends a long time learning. Mother and cub travel together, and the young badger watches her dig, hunt snakes and raid hives, gradually catching more food on its own. In the southern Kalahari, cubs stayed with their mothers for about 12 to 16 months, one of the longest periods of dependence among small carnivores, and this is one reason females need such large home ranges. Young males grow bigger than their mothers before they leave. Because a female raises only one cub at a time over more than a year, honey badgers reproduce slowly, so populations take a long time to recover when many adults are killed by people.

Adult honey badgers have few natural enemies, but they are not invincible. Lions and leopards are the main predators, and leopards in particular are known to kill and eat them. African rock pythons and spotted hyenas also take honey badgers now and then, and young cubs are at risk from jackals, large eagles and other carnivores when the mother is away. In Asia, tigers and leopards share parts of its range. The badger's defense is to make itself a bad meal. It turns to face the attacker, rattles and growls, releases a choking smell and fights back with claws and teeth, and its loose skin makes it hard to hold. Many predators give up, and videos of honey badgers chasing off lions at a kill or driving young leopards up trees are common. The idea that nothing can kill a honey badger is still a myth. Researchers in the Kalahari recorded badgers killed by leopards, lions and other badgers, and cubs that died when their mothers were killed. People are by far the biggest threat. Beekeepers, poultry farmers and ranchers trap and poison them, and the poisoned baits that are put out for jackals and other predators kill many honey badgers by accident. In some regions they are also hunted for traditional medicine or bushmeat, and many die on roads.

Honey badgers are wild carnivores that have never been domesticated, and the same traits that make them famous make them terrible pets. They are strong, stubborn and extremely good at escaping. Rehabilitation centers that care for orphaned or injured badgers describe animals that learn to open latches, dig under fences, climb walls and pile up objects to get out. They need large areas to roam, dig and forage, they mark with a strong smelling secretion, and they can bite hard when stressed. Keeping one alone in a house or a yard leads to a frustrated and often aggressive animal. Most countries and many states regulate or ban private ownership of wild carnivores, and in the countries where honey badgers live, taking them from the wild is usually illegal. Cubs offered for sale or as photo props almost always come from a mother that was killed. Searches for a pet honey badger or a pet badger end up feeding this trade. The best place to see honey badgers is in the wild, on a night drive in parks such as the Kgalagadi in South Africa and Botswana, Kruger, or Hwange in Zimbabwe, and the best way to help them is to support projects that protect them, such as badger friendly beekeeping in South Africa.

Across its range, the honey badger carries a strong reputation built on centuries of observation. In many African communities it is respected, and sometimes feared, as an animal of unusual courage and cunning, and in Afrikaans, ratel became a byword for toughness. The South African army even named an armored vehicle, the Ratel, after it. Traditional stories from parts of sub Saharan Africa describe it as an animal that cannot be beaten, a reflection of behavior people have seen with their own eyes. Its worldwide fame, though, came from the internet. In 2011 a YouTube video called The Crazy Nastyass Honey Badger, in which a comedian known as Randall narrated real wildlife footage of a badger raiding a beehive and eating a cobra, went viral, and the line honey badger don't care became a popular phrase. Scientists even used it in the title of their 2015 paper on venom resistance. Documentaries and viral clips of badgers facing lions, leopards and snakes have kept the legend going. Some of that legend is exaggerated: honey badgers do get killed by predators, and they do not seek out fights for fun. The real animal, a small carnivore that digs, hunts cobras and survives everywhere from the Kalahari to Kazakhstan, is remarkable enough without the myths.

The honey badger is not endangered, at least not globally. The IUCN lists the honey badger as Least Concern in its latest assessment, made in 2015 and published in 2016, because it still lives across a huge area of Africa and Asia, in many protected areas, and adapts to very different habitats. The same assessment, though, says the population is decreasing and notes that it needs updating. Nobody knows how many honey badgers there are, because they live at low densities, move over large areas and are hard to count. In several places they are clearly in trouble. Beekeepers and poultry farmers kill them in revenge for raided hives and coops, and poison baits set for jackals, caracals and other predators kill many by accident. In parts of Africa and Asia they are hunted for traditional medicine and bushmeat. At the edges of the range they are rare and protected: Kazakhstan lists the honey badger in its national Red Book, and in the United Arab Emirates its status is Data Deficient because there are so few records. In the Mediterranean region, which includes North Africa and the Levant, the IUCN rates it Near Threatened. Simple solutions help. In South Africa, beekeepers who raise their hives off the ground can sell honey with a badger friendly label, which has saved many badgers from traps.