What Are Honey Badgers Really Like?

classification at Melavora capensis. That year, a YouTube video went viral featuring a collage of national geographic footage showing honey badgers eating snakes, running backwards, and chasing jackals, with explet of written narration featuring the refrain honey badger, don't care. It's now been viewed over nine one million times, and Taylor Swift has admitted to being able to recite the

entire video by heart. And although the honey badger has established a lasting place in Internet culture because of this three minute comedy bit, its celebrity may make us think we know more about this strange, solitary animal than we actually do. The truth is honey badgers aren't well understood because they're extremely difficult to study. We spoke with Derek vonder Merva with the Endantured Wildlife Trust in South Africa. He said, how honey badgers became famous in America is incredible.

We get so many calls from Americans wanting to come film them because of the famous YouTube clip. They don't realize how difficult it is to film a honey badger because they're very intelligent, A lot of them forage at night, and they have extremely big home ranges, some of them up to five hundred square kilometers that's three square miles.

Honey Badgers are more closely related to a weasel than a European badger, and they don't actually eat honey, though their weakness for beehives and the tasty bee larva within often gets them in trouble with humans. They live in a wide range of habitats, from forests to deserts, but mostly hang out in dry areas in Africa, Southwest Asia, and India. Honey Badgers have become synonymous with aggression and ferocity.

Guinness World Records has named them the world's most fearless creature, to the point that particularly tenacious professional athletes sometimes earn honey badger as a nickname. They the honey badger animal not The athletes have a reputation for being nearly indestructible, but the truth is they're short, just about eleven inches at shoulder height, which is about twenty eight anometers and not very fast, so they're sometimes attacked and killed by

bigger predators. But for a honey badger, the best form of defense is attack. Vonder Mareva said. Their thick skin is loose, so loose, in fact, that they can almost turn around completely within it. If an animal bites the honey badger on the back, it can turn around and bite the animal right back. They have long claws on their front feet that they use for digging, but which

they use for fighting as well. Inexperienced predators a young leopard, lion, or hyena, for instance, might try to attack a honey badger once, but they'll never try it again after the first time. Honey Badgers often tangle of venomous snakes, but one misconception is that they are naturally immune to venom. While it's true they eat a lot of venomous animals, their immunity needs to be developed over time. How honey badgers acquire this immunity is not well studied or understood.

But mother honey badgers spend a long time raising each pub fourteen to eighteen months, and as the baby grows, it seems it's mom slowly introduces it to venomous animals, starting with the mildest scorpion and moving up the venom ladder until the youngsters eating cobras and puff adders. Another thing we get wrong about honey badgers is that we think they're like skunks because they bear a physical resemblance

in their fur pattern. Skunks spray a strong, unpleasant smelling liquid at their attackers to gross them out and get them away. And while it's true that honey badgers do store a revolting smelling substance in their anal pouch and they occasionally release it when they're in a life threatening situation, they don't weaponize it the way skunks do. It's more a panic button than a threat, though it's still something you don't want to get on you because that stench lingers.

When honey badgers were first described in South Africa, they were often found in bees nests, apparently feeding on honey, hence the common name. But it turns out that they were really interested in the bee brood, the nutritious lava found in the honeycomb. Mondamreva said. In South Africa, the honey badger was listed as near threatened in the early two thousand's beekeepers were killing them because they were causing hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of damage to the

beekeeping industry. Breaking into hives. Not only do they destroy the hive itself, the beekeeper loses honey and the swarm of bees. It's actually quite a lot of money. Some badgers just learned to live off sacking beehives, and they were being persecuted for it. But over the past two decades the relationship between badger and human has gotten better.

Vondermirva explained what we did in South Africa is start raising the hives off the ground by one point one meters or three point six feet, or strapping them together or two tires on the ground. This prevents the honey badgers rolling the hives, which is how they access them. In the early two thousand's, half the beekeepers we surveyed admitted to deliberately killing honey badgers because they were costing

them so much money. Since we've come up with these methods for preventing the badgers from accessing the hives, beekeepers are no longer killing them, and we've noticed an increase in numbers and in range in some areas. They've since been downgraded to a species of Least Concern, which is great news because even though they've got terrible personalities, honey badgers are good for ecosystems they live in because they're

not as fast as other predators. They'll dig rodents out of burrows but miscatching them, thus providing food for birds of prey and jack goals, which often follow a honey badger around waiting to catch the honey badger's intended prey. It's okay, though the honey badger don't care. Today's episode was written by Dave Ruse and produced by Tyler Clang. Brain Stuff is a production of I Heart Radio's How

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