Honey badger

Name and taxonomy

Johann Christian Daniel von Schreber described the species in 1777 from a skin sent from the Cape of Good Hope. He called it Viverra capensis, and the species name still records that cape. Gottlieb Conrad Christian Storr proposed the genus Mellivora in 1780, and the name means honey eater in Latin. John Edward Gray set up a tribe for it in 1865. The common name ratel may come from a Dutch word for rattle, or from raat, the Dutch for honeycomb.

Mellivora holds one living species, the honey badger, and that species is the sole member of the subfamily Mellivorinae. Zoologists placed it with the true badgers in the 1860s, but it shares little with them. Its nearest living relatives are the martens and the wolverine, in the subfamily Guloninae. Naturalists once described 16 subspecies from differences in size and the whiteness of the back. Since 2005, 12 of them have counted as valid. One of these, cottoni of central Africa, is completely black.

Evolution and relatives

The species first appeared in Asia during the middle Pliocene. Fossil relatives date to the Late Miocene, about 7 million years ago. Mellivora benfieldi lived in South Africa and Italy, Promellivora in Pakistan and Howellictis in Chad. A more distant cousin, Eomellivora, spread into several species across both the Old and New Worlds. The giant, long-legged Ekorus of Kenya belonged to the same wider group. The skull looks like an enlarged version of the marbled polecat's skull, which suggests a shared ancestry.

Appearance

An adult stands 23 to 28 centimetres at the shoulder and measures 55 to 77 cm from nose to rump. The tail adds 12 to 30 cm and is covered in long hair. African males weigh 9 to 16 kilograms and females 5 to 10. Three wild females from Iraq averaged 18 kg, so the species can grow much larger where food is rich. Males run about a third larger than females, and old males carry a scarred patch on the back from bites.

The body is long and thick-set with a broad back and short, sturdy legs. The head is small and flat, the muzzle short, the eyes small, and the ears no more than ridges of skin. The skin on the neck is 6 millimetres thick, which protects the animal in fights with its own kind. The fore claws are remarkably long, while those on the hind feet are short. Winter fur on the lower back grows 40 to 50 millimetres long, coarse and bristly with little underfur. In summer the coat shrinks to 15 mm and the belly is half bare. The lower body and the sides of the head are pure black, and a white band covers the back from head to tail.

Habitat and range

The honey badger ranges across sub-Saharan Africa from the Western Cape to southern Morocco and Algeria. Outside Africa it lives in Arabia, Iran and western Asia as far as Turkmenistan, and across the Indian peninsula. It avoids the driest heart of the Sahara and the Mediterranean coast. GBIF holds occurrence records from 57 countries. It climbs from sea level to 2,600 metres in the High Atlas and 4,000 m in Ethiopia's Bale Mountains.

Few mammals tolerate such a spread of habitats. It lives in rainforest, thorn forest, open woodland, floodplain grassland, rocky hills, steppe and desert. Rainfall in its haunts ranges from under 100 millimetres a year to over 2,000. It needs somewhere to shelter: a burrow of its own, an old aardvark or warthog hole, a termite mound, a cave or a hollow tree. Its own burrows usually have one entrance, run 1 to 3 metres, and end in a bare nesting chamber. In the Kalahari a mother with a cub moves to a different den almost every night.

Diet and hunting

Apart from the wolverine, no member of the weasel family eats so wide a range of food. The badger digs out insects, scorpions, frogs, lizards, tortoises, rodents and snakes, and takes birds and their eggs. It also eats berries, roots and bulbs. It swallows every part of its prey, including skin, hair, feathers and bone, and pins the food with its forepaws. In the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park, geckos and skinks made up 47.9% of prey species and gerbils and mice 39.7%. Most of the food by weight came from animals over 100 grams, such as cobras, young rock pythons and springhares. Prey ranged from 2 to 2,000 grams, and males and females caught prey of similar size despite their different bulk.

An adult male eats about 1.3 kilograms a day and a female about 0.9. Small mammals make up 80% of the diet from September to December, and large snakes 58% in the hot wet season. Honey badgers kill and eat black mambas, puff adders and Cape cobras. They tear open beehives for the larvae and the honey, and the smell of their anal pouch may calm the bees. The old story that a honeyguide bird leads the badger to hives has never been seen in the wild. Black-backed jackals steal food from foraging badgers, and a 2022 Kalahari study put the loss at 5% of intake.

Behaviour and social life

The honey badger is mostly solitary, though pairs sometimes hunt together in Africa. In the Serengeti it hunts by night in the dry season and by day, mostly at dawn and dusk, in the wet season. Indian studies at Sariska and Cauvery found it strongly nocturnal. It walks a slow, winding path, sniffing at every rodent hole and scent trail. A female covers about 10 kilometres a night and a male up to 27.

Home ranges are vast. In the southern Kalahari, adult males held an average of 541 square kilometres and females 126. Ranges overlap widely, and a dominant male's range may cover those of 13 females. Neither sex defends a territory, though females avoid each other. Males meeting at a burrow perform a stiff dance of body rotations, and the one that moves most wins. Both sexes mark with urine, faeces and anal-gland secretions while squatting.

The badger's fame rests on its refusal to back down. Cornered, it charges with head high, tail straight up, hair on end, and a loud rattling call. It can release a choking yellow fluid from its anal glands to drive off lions and hyenas. It attacks horses, cattle and buffalo that blunder into its burrow. Captive badgers have used tools and worked together to open gates, as a BBC film showed.

Communication and senses

The usual call is a hoarse, grating khrya-ya-ya-ya, like a high-pitched bark. Mating males grunt loudly, cubs whine, and a badger facing dogs screams like a bear cub. Scent carries most of the social messages. Squatting marks at latrines and burrow mouths tell neighbours who lives nearby. The eyes are small, and the animal finds its food mainly by smell and hearing. Sharp, pointed papillae on the tongue help it to break down tough food.

Reproduction and life cycle

There is no breeding season, and cubs arrive in any month. In southern Africa most matings fall between September and December, in the hot dry season. A female is in oestrus for about 14 days, and mating takes place inside a burrow. Dominant males are heavier and hold larger ranges, yet in one study the top male fathered only half of the cubs. Gestation lasts 50 to 70 days.

A litter holds one or two cubs, and in the Kalahari a mother usually raises one. The cub is born blind and hairless. One captive cub weighed 0.23 kilograms at two days old. Its eyes open after 33 days, its black-and-white coat forms by three months, and it reaches adult size at six months. The mother carries it to a new den about every three days for the first three months. She brings prey to the den from two to three months, and the cub follows her on foraging trips from about three months.

Only the mother raises the young, and she feeds it for 10 to 12 months. She teaches it to climb, dig and hunt, and it leaves her at about 14 months. In the Kgalagadi park 37% of cubs died, from predators, infanticide and starvation. Females can breed at 12 to 16 months, and males at two to three years. Because of the long care, a female breeds only once every 14 to 24 months. Wild badgers live about 7 to 8 years, while captives reach 24 to 26. Captive animals live far longer than wild ones, as is typical of mustelids.

Predators and threats

Lions, leopards and spotted hyenas take honey badgers, but mostly the old and the weak. The loose skin makes a young, fit badger hard to hold. In the Cape, rock pythons are a possible predator too. Bee stings, porcupine quills and bites seldom pierce the skin. A 2018 Serengeti study found that big predators had no effect on badger numbers. ADW notes that the black body and white mantle mimic a cheetah cub, which may make predators hesitate.

People are the real threat. Beekeepers and farmers poison, trap and shoot badgers that raid hives and kill poultry. Control campaigns against caracals kill badgers by accident. Whole populations are thought to have vanished from poisoning alone. The animal is also taken for bushmeat and for traditional medicine. Rabies passes to badgers from wild and domestic dogs.

Population and conservation

The IUCN listed the honey badger as Least Concern in 2016, because its range is enormous. Even so, it is nowhere common, and the population is falling. Its huge home ranges make it hard to count and hard to protect. Algeria, Morocco, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan protect it by law. India lists it under Schedule I of the Wildlife Protection Act of 1972, its strictest category. Ghana and Botswana have placed it on CITES Appendix III. It survives in reserves such as Kruger in South Africa and Ustyurt in Kazakhstan.

Relationship with humans

Honey badgers and beekeepers have fought for centuries. According to ADW the badger causes 26% of the damage to commercial hives. It rips planks from henhouses and tunnels under stone walls, and it kills more than it eats. One raid left 17 Muscovy ducks and 36 chickens dead. Dogs cannot hunt it safely, because it twists inside its skin and bites the jaw that holds it.

The badger seldom attacks people unless provoked. A rabid animal at Kromdraai, South Africa, bit a dog and several people over two days in July 2021. In Kenya it is a major reservoir of rabies. Badgers are said to be easy to tame, and some captives stop using their scent glands. Zoos exhibit them, and a few people keep them as pets. In parts of Africa its organs and skin go into traditional medicine as symbols of courage. On the credit side, it eats rodents and insects and so limits pest-borne disease.

In culture and myth

In Somali tradition, a man bitten by a honey badger becomes infertile, so people keep well clear of it. In India, folk stories accuse the badger of digging up human corpses. In San tradition, rock paintings in the Kalahari show the badger as a mark of bravery. During the British occupation of Basra in 2007, rumours spread of man-eating badgers released by the troops, which the army denied.

Modern media crowned it the most fearless animal in the world and, for its size, the strongest animal in Africa. The comic book Randall's Guide to Nastyass Animals: Honey Badger Don't Care turned it into an internet joke. Bitcoin supporters adopted it as a mascot, likening the currency's resistance to control to the animal's toughness. Spirit-animal writers read it as a sign of persistence and defiance, though that reading seems to be recent.