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The Most Fearless Creature on Earth_ Honey Badger in the Wild · Bible stories

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  Speaker 1: There is a creature out there, moving through the dark
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  Speaker 1: scrub of an African night, that has no idea it
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  Speaker 1: is supposed to be afraid of anything. Welcome to Sleepy Science.
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  Speaker 1: If this kind of slow, wandering exploration is your kind
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  Speaker 1: of thing, please like and subscribe, and drop a comment
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: below with whatever topic you want to drift off to next.
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: And if you want to help keep these videos going,
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  Speaker 1: you can find the Sleepy Science Patreon linked below. It
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  Speaker 1: means more than you know. Now, let us talk about
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  Speaker 1: the honey badger. The honey badger's scientific name is Melivora capensis.
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  Speaker 1: Melivora means, roughly, honey eater. And capensis refers to the
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  Speaker 1: Cape of Good Hope, in what is now South Africa,
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  Speaker 1: where early European naturalists first formally described the animal in writing.
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  Speaker 1: So embedded in the creature's very name is a sense
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  Speaker 1: of place, of geography, of ancient landscape. It carries its
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  Speaker 1: homeland in its title, the way a person might carry
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  Speaker 1: an accent long after they've left the place they grew up.
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  Speaker 1: The honey badger belongs to the family Mustelidae. This is
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  Speaker 1: the same family that contains weasels, otters, ferrets, wolverines, and martens.
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  Speaker 1: It is a large and diverse family, full of animals
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  Speaker 1: that tend to be small in body but enormous in attitude.
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  Speaker 1: The honey badger fits right in. In fact, within this family,
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  Speaker 1: the honey badger is the only living member of the
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  Speaker 1: genus Melivora. It is, in a quiet and unremarked upon way,
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  Speaker 1: entirely alone in its category. A genus of one, that
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  Speaker 1: aloneness is worth sitting with for a moment. In the
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  Speaker 1: taxonomy of life on Earth, to be the sole member
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  Speaker 1: of your genus is to occupy a kind of singular niche,
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  Speaker 1: a branch on the tree of life, that leads to
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  Speaker 1: no other living thing. The honey badger's closest living relatives
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  Speaker 1: are not especially close at all. It has been doing
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  Speaker 1: its own thing, genetically speaking, for a very long time.
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  Speaker 1: Fossil evidence suggests that animals very similar to the honey
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  Speaker 1: badger existed around five to six million years ago. Five
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  Speaker 1: to six million years. That is roughly the same period
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  Speaker 1: in which the lineage that would eventually become modern humans
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  Speaker 1: was beginning to diverge from the lineage that would become chimpanzees.
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  Speaker 1: In other words, while our distant ancestors were still figuring
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  Speaker 1: out what it meant to walk upright, something very much
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  Speaker 1: like a honey badger was already roaming the earth, already
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  Speaker 1: largely unconcerned with what anything else thought of it. The
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  Speaker 1: honey badger is found across an enormous range. It lives
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  Speaker 1: throughout sub-Saharan Africa, across much of the Middle East, through
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  Speaker 1: parts of Central Asia, and into the Indian subcontinent. This
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  Speaker 1: is not a creature that stays put. Its range spans
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  Speaker 1: several different continents and dozens of different ecosystems. From the dry,
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  Speaker 1: sun-baked savannas of Kenya to the arid hills of Iran,
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  Speaker 1: from the forested valleys of India to the semi-desert scrubland
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  Speaker 1: of Botswana, the honey badger makes itself at home It
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  Speaker 1: does not require a specific climate. It does not need
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  Speaker 1: a particular terrain. It adapts, quietly and without fuss, to
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  Speaker 1: wherever it finds itself. There is something quietly admirable about that.
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  Speaker 1: A kind of rootedness that has nothing to do with
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  Speaker 1: staying in one place. The honey badger is low and
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  Speaker 1: wide and built close to the ground. An adult male
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  Speaker 1: typically measures between 55 and 77 centimeters in body length,
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  Speaker 1: not counting the tail, which adds another 12 to 30 centimeters.
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  Speaker 1: In weight, males range from roughly 7 to 16 kilograms,
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  Speaker 1: while females are somewhat smaller, typically between 5 and 10 kilograms.
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  Speaker 1: These are not large numbers. The honey badger is, in
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  Speaker 1: raw mass, a small animal. But it carries itself as
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  Speaker 1: though mass is irrelevant, which, as it turns out, is
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  Speaker 1: a philosophy that has served it well. The coloring of
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  Speaker 1: the honey badger is one of its most distinctive features,
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  Speaker 1: and it follows a pattern worth noting carefully. The upper
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  Speaker 1: part of its body, the top of the head, the back,
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  Speaker 1: the sides, is pale silver-gray or off-white, depending on the
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  Speaker 1: individual and the subspecies. The lower part of its body,
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  Speaker 1: the belly, the legs, the face, is jet black. This
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  Speaker 1: two-toned coloring is not an accident of genetics. It is,
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  Speaker 1: almost certainly, a warning. In the natural world, high-contrast coloring
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  Speaker 1: often signals danger. Skunks are black and white. Certain venomous
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  Speaker 1: snakes wear vivid stripes. Wasps are yellow and black. The
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  Speaker 1: pattern says, In a language that predators seem to understand
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  Speaker 1: without being taught it, I am not worth the trouble.
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  Speaker 1: Leave me alone. The honey badger's coloring makes the same
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  Speaker 1: quiet declaration. And the declaration is not a bluff. There
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  Speaker 1: are around 12 recognized subspecies of honey badger distributed across
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  Speaker 1: its wide range. These subspecies differ in subtle ways. The
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  Speaker 1: shade of their silver grey, the exact dimensions of their bodies,
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  Speaker 1: the precise texture of their fur. But they are all, unmistakably,
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  Speaker 1: honey badgers. There is a quality to the animal that
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  Speaker 1: is essentially itself, regardless of where it lives or what
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  Speaker 1: it looks like in fine detail. The skin of the
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  Speaker 1: honey badger deserves its own quiet moment of appreciation. It
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  Speaker 1: is extraordinarily thick. The hide is tough and rubbery, particularly
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  Speaker 1: around the neck and back, where it can reach nearly
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  Speaker 1: six millimeters in thickness. To give you a sense of
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  Speaker 1: what that means, that is thick enough that a honey
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  Speaker 1: badger has been observed shaking off the bite of a
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  Speaker 1: porcupine quill, Porcupine quills are not soft things. They are barbed, sharp,
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  Speaker 1: and painful enough to be a serious deterrent for most animals.
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  Speaker 1: For the honey badger, they are more of a minor inconvenience.
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  Speaker 1: The skin is also famously loose. This is one of
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  Speaker 1: the features that makes the honey badger so difficult to
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  Speaker 1: harm in a conventional way. When a predator grabs a
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  Speaker 1: honey badger by the scruff, a move that works beautifully
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  Speaker 1: on most small animals, as it causes immediate submission and stillness,
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  Speaker 1: the honey badger can turn inside its own skin. Not fully,
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  Speaker 1: but enough. Enough to reach back and bite whatever is
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  Speaker 1: holding it. Enough to make the attacker regret its decisions.
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  Speaker 1: This loose, thick skin has been compared, in various wildlife
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  Speaker 1: documents and field notes, to a kind of living armour.
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  Speaker 1: But armour is a word that implies something passive, something
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  Speaker 1: that simply absorbs. The honey badger's skin is not passive.
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  Speaker 1: It is part of an active defensive system, one that
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  Speaker 1: turns the very act of being grabbed into an opportunity
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  Speaker 1: for counter-attack. The honey badger's claws are large and extremely powerful.
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  Speaker 1: They are adapted primarily for digging, and the honey badger
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  Speaker 1: is a prodigious digger indeed. In soft enough soil, a
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  Speaker 1: honey badger can dig itself into the ground in roughly
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  Speaker 1: 10 minutes, disappearing completely from the surface and vanishing into
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  Speaker 1: the earth. This ability to excavate quickly is used both
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  Speaker 1: for finding food and for making shelter. The honey badger
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  Speaker 1: is not sentimental about burrows. It will dig a new
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  Speaker 1: one as needed, sleep in it for a night or
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  Speaker 1: a few days, and move on. Honey badgers are largely
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  Speaker 1: solitary animals. They do not form packs or social groups.
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  Speaker 1: They do not appear to require the company of their
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  Speaker 1: own kind in any meaningful way. Males and females come
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  Speaker 1: together only briefly, for mating, and then part ways again
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  Speaker 1: with what one might describe, perhaps slightly unfairly, as minimal sentiment.
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  Speaker 1: The honey badger moves through its world alone, which is
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  Speaker 1: not the same as moving through its world lonely. Their
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  Speaker 1: home ranges are large, remarkably so for an animal of
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  Speaker 1: their size. A male honey badger may patrol a range
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  Speaker 1: of several hundred square kilometers over the course of a year.
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  Speaker 1: That is a vast territory for an animal you could lift,
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  Speaker 1: if you were foolish enough to try. Females tend to
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  Speaker 1: have smaller home ranges, but still impressive ones, often overlapping
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  Speaker 1: with the ranges of several males. The honey badger is
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  Speaker 1: primarily carnivorous, though it is more accurately described as omnivorous,
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  Speaker 1: given that it will eat fruit, roots, and plant matter
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  Speaker 1: when the opportunity arises. But meat is the core of
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  Speaker 1: its diet. And it is an exceptional hunter, given its
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  Speaker 1: size of a wide range of prey. Rodents, birds, reptiles, insects, frogs, fish, eggs, larvae.
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  Speaker 1: Almost nothing is off the menu. Snakes are a particularly
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  Speaker 1: notable part of the honey badger's diet, and this is
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  Speaker 1: where the story gets quietly extraordinary. Honey badgers regularly hunt
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  Speaker 1: and eat venomous snakes. Not accidentally. Not as a last resort.
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  Speaker 1: As a deliberate and apparently preferred meal. Cobras, puff adders,
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  Speaker 1: and black mambas have all been documented as honey badger prey.
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  Speaker 1: The black mamba is widely considered one of the most
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  Speaker 1: dangerous snakes in Africa. With venom potent enough to kill
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  Speaker 1: a person in a matter of hours, the honey badger
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  Speaker 1: eats them. How does it survive? The answer lies in
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  Speaker 1: the honey badger's biology. Research has shown that honey badgers
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  Speaker 1: have a significant degree of resistance to certain snake venoms,
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  Speaker 1: particularly the neurotoxic venoms used by cobras. The resistance appears
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  Speaker 1: to come from genetic mutations in the honey badger's nicotinic
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  Speaker 1: acetylcholine receptors, the molecular targets that snake venom uses to
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  Speaker 1: shut down the nervous system. In honey badgers, these receptors
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  Speaker 1: have been altered in ways that make the venom significantly
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  Speaker 1: less effective. What this means in practice is quietly remarkable
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  Speaker 1: to observe. A honey badger can be bitten by a
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  Speaker 1: venomous snake, stagger, go limp, and fall into what appears
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  Speaker 1: to be a coma or deep sleep. And then, after
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  Speaker 1: a period of perhaps two to four hours, It wakes
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  Speaker 1: up again, stands, shakes itself off, and goes back to
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  Speaker 1: eating the snake. There is something almost dreamlike about that image.
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  Speaker 1: The animal collapsed in the grass, the snake nearby, and then, slowly,
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  Speaker 1: the honey badger rising again. as if nothing particularly significant
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  Speaker 1: had occurred. The venom resistance is not unlimited. Honey badgers
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  Speaker 1: are not invincible. Large enough doses of venom, or repeated
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  Speaker 1: bites in quick succession, can still be fatal. But the
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  Speaker 1: threshold is remarkably high. High enough that venomous snakes... which
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  Speaker 1: are many other animals' most feared predators, are simply part
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  Speaker 1: of the honey badger's ordinary working week. The honey badger
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  Speaker 1: also has some resistance to bee stings, which relates, naturally,
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  Speaker 1: to the other half of its name. The honey in
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  Speaker 1: honey badger refers to its fondness for raiding bees' nests.
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  Speaker 1: The animal will tear into a hive, wild hives in
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  Speaker 1: tree cavities, cliff faces, or in the ground, with its
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  Speaker 1: powerful claws enduring a cloud of angry bees, to reach
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  Speaker 1: the honeycomb inside. It does not appear to enjoy being stung, exactly,
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  Speaker 1: but it appears to regard the stinging as an acceptable
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  Speaker 1: cost of doing business. The thick skin helps here too.
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  Speaker 1: Bee stings are designed to penetrate and deliver venom into
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  Speaker 1: soft tissue. The honey badger's hide, particularly on the back
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  Speaker 1: and neck, is simply too dense for many stings to
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  Speaker 1: reach deep enough to cause serious harm. The face and
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  Speaker 1: the belly are more vulnerable, but the honey badger's strategy
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  Speaker 1: honed over millions of years, seems to be to get
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  Speaker 1: the job done quickly enough, that even a lot of
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  Speaker 1: stings are worth the reward. What the honey badger is
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  Speaker 1: after in a hive is not just honey. It is
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  Speaker 1: also bee larvae. The larvae are protein-rich and calorie-dense, and
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  Speaker 1: for an animal that burns through energy at the rate
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  Speaker 1: a honey badger does, Every calorie counts. Honey is the bonus.
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  Speaker 1: The larvae are the meal. There is a creature that
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  Speaker 1: has a long and storied relationship with the honey badger
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  Speaker 1: when it comes to finding bees' nests. The greater honey guide,
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  Speaker 1: a small bird found across much of sub-Saharan Africa, has
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  Speaker 1: evolved a remarkable behaviour. It leads animals and sometimes humans
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  Speaker 1: to bees' nests, then waits while the larger creature breaks
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  Speaker 1: the nest open and feeds on the exposed wax and
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  Speaker 1: larvae once the nest is breached. The relationship between the
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  Speaker 1: honey guide and humans has been well documented. Its relationship
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  Speaker 1: with the honey badger is somewhat more contested among researchers.
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  Speaker 1: Some early accounts described honey badgers actively following honey guides.
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  Speaker 1: More recent field research has questioned how common or deliberate
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  Speaker 1: this behavior really is. The truth, as it often is
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  Speaker 1: in ecology, may lie somewhere in between. The honey badger's
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  Speaker 1: sense of smell is highly developed. Like many members of
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  Speaker 1: the mustelid family, It uses scent as its primary means
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  Speaker 1: of gathering information about the world. It can detect prey underground,
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  Speaker 1: a rodent sleeping in a burrow, a beetle larva tunneling
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  Speaker 1: through soil, by scent alone, and will then dig directly
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  Speaker 1: and efficiently toward it. This is a kind of perception
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  Speaker 1: that is difficult to imagine from a human perspective. be
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  Speaker 1: able to smell the architecture of the earth beneath you,
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  Speaker 1: to read the dark soil the way we might read
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  Speaker 1: a map. Honey badgers also have anal scent glands, similar
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  Speaker 1: to those found in skunks and other mustelids. They can
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  Speaker 1: avert these glands. turn them inside out, to release a
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  Speaker 1: strongly smelling secretion. This is used for communication, for marking territory, and,
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  Speaker 1: when threatened, as a deterrent. The odour is described by
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  Speaker 1: those who have encountered it as powerful and distinctly unpleasant,
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  Speaker 1: though it is not quite as debilitating as the spray
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  Speaker 1: of a skunk. Still, it adds yet another layer to
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  Speaker 1: the honey badger's arsenal of disincentives. The honey badger is
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  Speaker 1: largely nocturnal in areas where it coexists with humans, emerging
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  Speaker 1: at night to avoid contact. In more remote areas, away
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  Speaker 1: from human settlements, it is also active during the day.
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  Speaker 1: It is, fundamentally, active whenever it feels like being active.
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  Speaker 1: The honey badger does not structure its behavior around the
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  Speaker 1: convenience of others. It is an opportunistic feeder in the
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  Speaker 1: truest sense. It will follow lions and other large predators,
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  Speaker 1: scavenging from kills. It will steal food from leopards. It
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  Speaker 1: will approach a carcass that other scavengers have already gathered
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  Speaker 1: around and simply begin eating, apparently unconcerned by the competition.
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  Speaker 1: This boldness is not aggression, exactly. It is something closer
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  Speaker 1: to a settled indifference to the opinions of others. Encounters
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  Speaker 1: between honey badgers and much larger predators are among the
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  Speaker 1: more quietly extraordinary things documented in African wildlife. There are
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  Speaker 1: multiple recorded accounts of honey badgers chasing lions, not defending
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  Speaker 1: themselves while retreating, actively pursuing a seven-kilogram animal running toward
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  Speaker 1: a 200-kilogram apex predator with what appears to be genuine irritation. Lions,
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  Speaker 1: in these accounts, typically leave. They could obviously kill the
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  Speaker 1: honey badger. But lions, like most intelligent animals, make a
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  Speaker 1: cost-benefit calculation. And the cost of dealing with a honey
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  Speaker 1: badger The biting, the writhing, the noise, the sheer tenacious
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  Speaker 1: effort of subduing it, usually outweighs whatever benefit the lion
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  Speaker 1: might gain. This reputation has earned the honey badger a
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  Speaker 1: place in the Guinness World Records. It has been listed
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  Speaker 1: as the world's most fearless animal. This is, of course...
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  Speaker 1: a somewhat difficult thing to measure objectively. Fear is a
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  Speaker 1: subjective experience. Whether the honey badger truly feels no fear,
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  Speaker 1: or simply has a threat assessment system calibrated very differently
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  Speaker 1: from most other animals, is a question that science cannot
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  Speaker 1: fully answer. But the behavior is real. The pattern is consistent.
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  Speaker 1: And the record stands. The honey badger's teeth are powerful
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  Speaker 1: and versatile. The canines are long and sharp, used for
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  Speaker 1: gripping and tearing flesh. The molars are robust and adapted
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  Speaker 1: for crushing, capable of cracking through the shells of tortoises. Yes, tortoises.
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  Speaker 1: honey badgers have been observed cracking open tortoise shells to
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  Speaker 1: eat the animal inside. The tortoise shell is a structure
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  Speaker 1: that has taken hundreds of millions of years to evolve
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  Speaker 1: specifically as protection against predation. The honey badger finds it manageable.
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  Speaker 1: Honey badgers are also strong swimmers, though they do not
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  Speaker 1: seek out water especially. And they can climb trees particularly
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  Speaker 1: when pursuing prey or investigating potential food sources. There are
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  Speaker 1: documented cases of honey badgers climbing thorny acacia trees to
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  Speaker 1: raid birds' nests, which requires a degree of both climbing
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  Speaker 1: ability and pain tolerance that most mammals would consider unreasonable.
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  Speaker 1: The honey badger considers it Tuesday. The eyes of the
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  Speaker 1: honey badger are relatively small and positioned somewhat to the
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  Speaker 1: sides of the head. Vision is not its primary sense.
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  Speaker 1: The nose does far more work. But the eyes are
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  Speaker 1: functional and alert, and honey badgers in the wild are
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  Speaker 1: described as watchful in a quiet way, not fearful, just aware.
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  Speaker 1: There is a difference between vigilance born of anxiety And vigilance,
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  Speaker 1: born of simple, settled attention. The honey badger's watchfulness has
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  Speaker 1: the quality of the latter. Now, let us slow down
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  Speaker 1: for a moment and sit with the idea of the
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  Speaker 1: honey badger's intelligence. Because this is an area of the
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  Speaker 1: animal's life that does not always get the attention it deserves.
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  Speaker 1: Honey badgers are considered to be among the more cognitively
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  Speaker 1: sophisticated animals in the mustelid family. They have been observed
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  Speaker 1: using tools. In South Africa, a captive honey badger named
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  Speaker 1: Stoffel became quietly famous among wildlife researchers and keepers for
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  Speaker 1: his escape attempts at the Moholoholo Wildlife Rehabilitation Centre. Stoffel
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  Speaker 1: did not simply push on walls or test fences. He
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  Speaker 1: used objects, rakes, stones, a sleeping warthog, as tools and
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  Speaker 1: stepping stones. He would pile debris into a corner, climb it,
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  Speaker 1: and go over a wall. When the keepers removed the debris,
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  Speaker 1: he would find new materials. When the walls were raised,
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  Speaker 1: he found new strategies. This iterative problem solving, this ability
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  Speaker 1: to observe an obstacle, test a solution, and adapt when
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  Speaker 1: the solution failed, is a marker of genuine cognitive flexibility.
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  Speaker 1: Tool use in non-human animals has long fascinated researchers because
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  Speaker 1: it suggests something about the inner life of an animal.
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  Speaker 1: To use a tool, you have to perceive the gap
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  Speaker 1: between where you are and where you want to be.
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  Speaker 1: You have to understand that an object in the world
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  Speaker 1: can serve as an extension of your own body. You
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  Speaker 1: have to plan, in at least a rudimentary way, across time.
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  Speaker 1: These are not nothing. In the animal kingdom, they are
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  Speaker 1: remarkable capacities, usually associated with primates, corvids, and cetaceans. The
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  Speaker 1: honey badger belongs in that company, quietly. Honey badgers also
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  Speaker 1: appear to have long memories. Captive individuals have been shown
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  Speaker 1: to remember the locations of food sources the faces and
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  Speaker 1: behavior patterns of individual humans, and the solutions to problems
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  Speaker 1: they have solved before. They learn from experience, and they
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  Speaker 1: adapt that learning to new situations. This is, in the
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  Speaker 1: truest sense, intelligence. In the wild, Honey badgers have been
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  Speaker 1: observed monitoring situations across time. A honey badger that is
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  Speaker 1: thwarted from reaching a beehive on one visit has been
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  Speaker 1: recorded returning to the same hive days later, approaching from
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  Speaker 1: a different angle, using a different method of access. The
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  Speaker 1: persistence is not blind repetition. It is adaptive persistence... which
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  Speaker 1: is the only kind worth having. The honey badger communicates
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  Speaker 1: through a variety of sounds, though it is not a
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  Speaker 1: particularly vocal animal by nature. It grunts, growls, hisses, and rattles,
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  Speaker 1: sounds that are generally associated with either finding food or
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  Speaker 1: expressing displeasure at being disturbed. When threatened or cornered, it
• 29:54
  Speaker 1: produces a prolonged, high-pitched scream. that is described by wildlife
• 30:01
  Speaker 1: researchers as impressively loud for an animal its size, and
• 30:06
  Speaker 1: remarkably unnerving to hear in the dark. Mothers with cubs
• 30:12
  Speaker 1: communicate more softly. There are quiet, chittering sounds, gentle chirps,
• 30:20
  Speaker 1: that seem to be used between a mother and her young.
• 30:25
  Speaker 1: The contrast between the fierce, rattling defense sounds of an
• 30:30
  Speaker 1: adult honey badger and the soft chirping between a mother
• 30:34
  Speaker 1: and her babies is, in a way that is hard
• 30:38
  Speaker 1: to articulate, quietly moving. Let us talk about reproduction. Honey
• 30:48
  Speaker 1: badgers do not have a fixed mating season. In regions
• 30:53
  Speaker 1: with more pronounced seasons, There may be peaks of mating activity,
• 30:59
  Speaker 1: but the animal is largely flexible about this, as it
• 31:03
  Speaker 1: is about most things. The gestation period is approximately 60
• 31:09
  Speaker 1: to 70 days, which is relatively short. Litter sizes are small,
• 31:17
  Speaker 1: usually just one or two cubs, occasionally three. Honey badger
• 31:24
  Speaker 1: cubs are born blind and helpless. They are pink and soft,
• 31:31
  Speaker 1: without the tough hide they will later develop, without the
• 31:35
  Speaker 1: colouring that will eventually mark them so clearly. They are,
• 31:41
  Speaker 1: in their earliest days, every bit as vulnerable as any
• 31:45
  Speaker 1: other small, new creature in the world. The mother nurses
• 31:52
  Speaker 1: them and keeps them in a burrow for the first
• 31:54
  Speaker 1: few weeks of their lives. The cubs develop fairly quickly.
• 32:01
  Speaker 1: They begin to move around and explore within a few months.
• 32:06
  Speaker 1: The mother teaches them, through observation and proximity, as most
• 32:12
  Speaker 1: wild mammals learn, how to hunt, how to dig, how
• 32:18
  Speaker 1: to locate food. Young honey badgers stay with their mothers
• 32:23
  Speaker 1: for a relatively extended period by mustelid standards, sometimes up
• 32:28
  Speaker 1: to 14 to 16 months. This extended period of maternal
• 32:34
  Speaker 1: association gives the cubs time to develop the complex skills
• 32:39
  Speaker 1: they will need. The hunting, the digging, the social navigation,
• 32:46
  Speaker 1: the accumulated wisdom about what is edible. What is dangerous?
• 32:52
  Speaker 1: And what is merely unpleasant? There is something worth pausing
• 32:58
  Speaker 1: on here, in the image of a young honey badger
• 33:01
  Speaker 1: following its mother through the scrub. The small creature, still
• 33:08
  Speaker 1: soft-faced and uncertain, watching how the adult moves, how it pauses,
• 33:15
  Speaker 1: how it reads the ground. Learning, the way all young
• 33:21
  Speaker 1: animals learn, by watching someone who already knows. And then,
• 33:29
  Speaker 1: in time, going out alone. The honey badger is considered
• 33:36
  Speaker 1: a keystone species in some ecosystems. Its digging activity aerates
• 33:43
  Speaker 1: and turns over soil, which benefits plant growth and the
• 33:47
  Speaker 1: health of the soil ecosystem. the burrows it excavates, and
• 33:54
  Speaker 1: then frequently abandons, are reused by a wide range of
• 33:59
  Speaker 1: other animals. Warthogs, jackals, porcupines, various birds, reptiles, and small
• 34:10
  Speaker 1: mammals all benefit from the ready-made shelter of a vacated
• 34:14
  Speaker 1: honey badger burrow. In this way, the honey badger is
• 34:20
  Speaker 1: quietly generous to its ecosystem, entirely without intending to be.
• 34:27
  Speaker 1: It digs for its own reasons. For food, for shelter,
• 34:33
  Speaker 1: for access to whatever lies below. And in doing so,
• 34:38
  Speaker 1: creates homes for dozens of other creatures. The world is
• 34:43
  Speaker 1: often reshaped by those who are not particularly trying to
• 34:46
  Speaker 1: reshape it. The honey badger's relationship with human communities across
• 34:53
  Speaker 1: its range is complex and often fraught. In areas where
• 34:58
  Speaker 1: it comes into contact with farming communities, it is often
• 35:02
  Speaker 1: regarded as a pest. And with some reason, a honey
• 35:09
  Speaker 1: badger that discovers a chicken coop will not stop at
• 35:13
  Speaker 1: one chicken. It will continue until it cannot continue or
• 35:19
  Speaker 1: until it is driven off. This behavior of killing beyond
• 35:25
  Speaker 1: immediate need is known as surplus killing, and it is
• 35:31
  Speaker 1: seen in several predator species. It appears to be an
• 35:35
  Speaker 1: adaptive behavior from evolutionary contexts where prey is scarce and unpredictable,
• 35:42
  Speaker 1: and any kill that can be made should be made
• 35:45
  Speaker 1: and cashed. Honey badgers have also been known to damage
• 35:50
  Speaker 1: beehives kept by human beekeepers, which has made them adversaries
• 35:55
  Speaker 1: in communities that keep bees for honey production. Various solutions
• 36:01
  Speaker 1: have been developed to protect hives, including raising them on
• 36:06
  Speaker 1: poles coated with grease, which the honey badger cannot grip.
• 36:12
  Speaker 1: The ingenuity of these solutions is matched. Some beekeepers report
• 36:17
  Speaker 1: that by the honey badger's ingenuity in eventually defeating them.
• 36:24
  Speaker 1: In South Africa, the honey badger is a protected species
• 36:28
  Speaker 1: under national legislation. In other parts of its range, legal
• 36:35
  Speaker 1: protection is more variable. The species is currently classified as
• 36:40
  Speaker 1: least concern by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
• 36:47
  Speaker 1: which means it is not considered at immediate risk of extinction.
• 36:52
  Speaker 1: But its populations in some areas are declining due to
• 36:57
  Speaker 1: habitat loss, human-wildlife conflict, and, particularly in parts of Asia,
• 37:06
  Speaker 1: being hunted or trapped. The broader trend of human encroachment
• 37:12
  Speaker 1: on wild habitats puts pressure on the honey badger's vast
• 37:15
  Speaker 1: home ranges, an animal that needs several hundred square kilometers
• 37:21
  Speaker 1: to live as it naturally would, is not easily accommodated
• 37:25
  Speaker 1: in a fragmented landscape. The honey badger adapts, because adapting
• 37:33
  Speaker 1: is what it does. But adaptation has limits, even for
• 37:38
  Speaker 1: the world's most fearless animal. In Indian culture, the honey badger,
• 37:46
  Speaker 1: known there as Bijou, or Ratel, has a place in
• 37:51
  Speaker 1: folklore and rural storytelling. Stories of its remarkable tenacity and
• 37:58
  Speaker 1: resistance to snake venom have circulated through human communities that
• 38:02
  Speaker 1: share its range for as long as those communities have
• 38:05
  Speaker 1: been observing wildlife. In some traditions, the animal is associated
• 38:12
  Speaker 1: with fearlessness as a virtue, a kind of embodied lesson
• 38:17
  Speaker 1: in perseverance. The snake does its worst, and the honey
• 38:23
  Speaker 1: badger gets back up. There are worse stories to tell
• 38:28
  Speaker 1: a child. The retell, the honey badger's other common name,
• 38:36
  Speaker 1: comes from an Afrikaans word, which itself may derive from
• 38:40
  Speaker 1: older Dutch or German roots. though the exact etymology is debated.
• 38:47
  Speaker 1: In Southern African English, both ratel and honey badger are
• 38:52
  Speaker 1: used interchangeably. The animal collects names the way it collects enemies,
• 38:59
  Speaker 1: without particular concern and from a wide range of sources.
• 39:06
  Speaker 1: In the Middle East, honey badgers have occasionally been in
• 39:10
  Speaker 1: the news for unexpected reasons. In 2007, during the conflict
• 39:17
  Speaker 1: in Basra, Iraq, British forces were reportedly blamed by some
• 39:24
  Speaker 1: local residents for releasing honey badgers into the city. The
• 39:30
  Speaker 1: story circulated widely on social media. It was not true.
• 39:36
  Speaker 1: The honey badgers were simply wild animals that had always
• 39:40
  Speaker 1: lived in the region. But the fact that people found
• 39:43
  Speaker 1: it plausible says something interesting about the honey badger's reputation.
• 39:50
  Speaker 1: the idea of it being weaponized is not, to be honest,
• 39:56
  Speaker 1: entirely difficult to imagine. The honey badger's digestive system is robust.
• 40:05
  Speaker 1: It can process a wide range of foods, including things
• 40:10
  Speaker 1: that would be toxic to most mammals. there is some
• 40:14
  Speaker 1: research suggesting that its liver and kidneys are unusually efficient
• 40:18
  Speaker 1: at processing certain toxins, which complements its resistance to venom
• 40:24
  Speaker 1: and supports its ability to eat prey that other animals
• 40:28
  Speaker 1: would avoid. Its body is, in essence, a system designed
• 40:35
  Speaker 1: to eat the things that other systems can't. The typical
• 40:41
  Speaker 1: lifespan of a honey badger in the wild is difficult
• 40:44
  Speaker 1: to determine precisely because the animals are hard to track
• 40:49
  Speaker 1: and study over long periods. Estimates range from seven to
• 40:55
  Speaker 1: ten years in the wild, though some individuals may live
• 40:59
  Speaker 1: longer in safer environments. In captivity, honey badgers have been
• 41:06
  Speaker 1: known to live into their mid-twenties. Stoffel, the escape artist
• 41:12
  Speaker 1: of Maholaholo, live to approximately 26 years of age, which
• 41:18
  Speaker 1: is remarkable for an animal his size. In the wild,
• 41:25
  Speaker 1: the hazards are significant. Large predators, vehicles on roads, traps,
• 41:34
  Speaker 1: and the simple physical cost of the honey badger's intense
• 41:37
  Speaker 1: way of living all take their toll. An animal that
• 41:43
  Speaker 1: regularly engages venomous snakes and irritated bee colonies is an
• 41:50
  Speaker 1: animal that absorbs a continuous stream of physical insults. The
• 41:56
  Speaker 1: resilience required to sustain that way of life over many
• 42:00
  Speaker 1: years is something to quietly marvel at. The honey badger's
• 42:07
  Speaker 1: skull is thick and somewhat flattened. with a structure that
• 42:11
  Speaker 1: provides protection to the brain during attacks. The jaw muscles
• 42:16
  Speaker 1: are large and powerful, giving the bite force that the
• 42:20
  Speaker 1: animal's hunting and foraging require. The shape of the skull
• 42:26
  Speaker 1: has led some researchers to compare the honey badger's head,
• 42:30
  Speaker 1: in terms of function if not appearance, to a kind
• 42:34
  Speaker 1: of battering ram, built to push through, to absorb, to withstand.
• 42:43
  Speaker 1: The honey badger's forelegs are notably powerful, more so than
• 42:47
  Speaker 1: its hind legs. This reflects its primary locomotive strategy, which
• 42:54
  Speaker 1: involves digging and tearing at the ground. When it moves
• 42:59
  Speaker 1: across open ground, it has a characteristic rolling, bow-legged gait,
• 43:06
  Speaker 1: unhurried in appearance. but deceptively fast when it needs to be.
• 43:13
  Speaker 1: Honey badgers can run at speeds of around 25 to
• 43:17
  Speaker 1: 30 kilometers per hour over short distances, which is not
• 43:22
  Speaker 1: as fast as many of the animals they contend with,
• 43:26
  Speaker 1: but faster than their ambling appearance might suggest. They are
• 43:31
  Speaker 1: persistent travelers. a honey badger covering its home range may
• 43:37
  Speaker 1: travel 10 to 15 kilometers in a single night. Night
• 43:43
  Speaker 1: after night, the same methodical coverage of the same wide territory,
• 43:48
  Speaker 1: checking familiar spots, investigating new scents, following the slow logic
• 43:55
  Speaker 1: of its own internal map. There is something almost meditative
• 44:01
  Speaker 1: about imagining that, an animal moving steadily through the dark, unhurried, purposeful,
• 44:10
  Speaker 1: entirely at home in its own existence. Honey badgers do
• 44:17
  Speaker 1: not hibernate. In colder parts of their range, they may
• 44:23
  Speaker 1: become somewhat less active during the coldest months, but they
• 44:27
  Speaker 1: do not enter a true state of torpor or hibernation.
• 44:32
  Speaker 1: They simply continue. Quietly. Persistently. As they always do. The
• 44:43
  Speaker 1: honey badger's relationship to fear is worth thinking about more
• 44:47
  Speaker 1: deeply for a moment. Because what we observe in the
• 44:51
  Speaker 1: honey badger is not the absence of caution. It pauses
• 44:56
  Speaker 1: before entering a burrow it didn't dig. It sniffs carefully
• 45:01
  Speaker 1: around unfamiliar objects. It assesses before it acts. What seems
• 45:08
  Speaker 1: to be different in the honey badger is its assessment
• 45:11
  Speaker 1: of risk versus reward. It seems to have a threshold
• 45:16
  Speaker 1: for turning away from a threat that is set extraordinarily high.
• 45:23
  Speaker 1: Not absent. Just. Very, very high. In human terms, we
• 45:34
  Speaker 1: might call this a kind of courage. But courage is
• 45:38
  Speaker 1: a moral category, and we should be careful about projecting
• 45:43
  Speaker 1: moral categories onto animals. What the honey badger demonstrates is
• 45:50
  Speaker 1: perhaps better described as a calm, settled confidence in its
• 45:55
  Speaker 1: own ability to handle whatever arises. A confidence that is
• 46:02
  Speaker 1: as far as we can tell, fully justified by its
• 46:05
  Speaker 1: biology and behavior. There is something worth pausing on in
• 46:11
  Speaker 1: the contrast between the honey badger's physical modesty, its compact body,
• 46:18
  Speaker 1: its low profile, its unremarkable size, and its behavioral enormity.
• 46:27
  Speaker 1: It is so small, and it lives so large. Most
• 46:32
  Speaker 1: of the world is arranged by size. Bigger animals eat
• 46:37
  Speaker 1: smaller ones. Greater mass confers access and power. The honey
• 46:44
  Speaker 1: badger operates by different arithmetic. It seems to have decided,
• 46:51
  Speaker 1: somewhere deep in its evolutionary history, that size is not
• 46:55
  Speaker 1: the only variable that matters. And that decision that evolutionary
• 47:02
  Speaker 1: bet has worked. The honey badger has persisted for millions
• 47:08
  Speaker 1: of years across dozens of ecosystems alongside changing climates and
• 47:15
  Speaker 1: shifting landscapes through the rise of new predators and the
• 47:20
  Speaker 1: extinction of old ones without becoming something else. It has
• 47:26
  Speaker 1: remained stubbornly and magnificently The honey badger was recorded on
• 47:36
  Speaker 1: video by researchers in Kalahari, using camera traps, stealing a
• 47:40
  Speaker 1: carcass from leopards and returning for it across multiple nights.
• 47:46
  Speaker 1: The leopard had stored the carcass in a tree, a
• 47:49
  Speaker 1: common strategy to keep food away from ground-level scavengers. The
• 47:55
  Speaker 1: honey badger climbed the tree, retrieved portions of the carcass,
• 48:01
  Speaker 1: and dragged them down. When the leopard returned, there was
• 48:07
  Speaker 1: a confrontation. The leopard, far larger, retreated. The honey badger
• 48:15
  Speaker 1: continued eating. The camera trap footage exists. It has been
• 48:22
  Speaker 1: watched by a great many people, and most of them,
• 48:27
  Speaker 1: watching it, feel something that is difficult to name, but
• 48:32
  Speaker 1: is close to respect. Let us talk for a moment
• 48:37
  Speaker 1: about what it means to be genuinely unbothered. In the
• 48:42
  Speaker 1: human world, we speak a lot about confidence, about not
• 48:48
  Speaker 1: caring what others think. But this is usually a kind
• 48:52
  Speaker 1: of performance, a position taken and maintained with some effort
• 48:57
  Speaker 1: against the pull of social concern. The honey badger is
• 49:02
  Speaker 1: not performing anything. It is not constructing its identity in
• 49:08
  Speaker 1: opposition to the opinions of other animals. It simply does
• 49:13
  Speaker 1: what it does, with its full attention, because that is
• 49:18
  Speaker 1: what there is to do. There is something quietly instructive
• 49:23
  Speaker 1: in that. Not as a moral lesson, exactly, but as
• 49:30
  Speaker 1: an image. The honey badger, moving through its territory in
• 49:36
  Speaker 1: the dark. perfectly complete in its own existence, unburdened by
• 49:42
  Speaker 1: the categories that others might place on it. In captivity,
• 49:49
  Speaker 1: honey badgers require careful management. They are intelligent enough to
• 49:55
  Speaker 1: be easily bored, and a bored honey badger is a
• 49:59
  Speaker 1: destructive honey badger. Wildlife facilities that house them provide enrichment activities. puzzles,
• 50:09
  Speaker 1: hidden food, varied digging opportunities to keep their minds occupied.
• 50:17
  Speaker 1: They also require enclosures that are built to a standard
• 50:20
  Speaker 1: considerably higher than those used for most animals of comparable size.
• 50:26
  Speaker 1: Thick walls, buried foundations to prevent digging underneath, overhanging barriers
• 50:33
  Speaker 1: to prevent climbing over. And even then, some individuals find
• 50:40
  Speaker 1: a way through. Stoffel, again, is the most famous example.
• 50:49
  Speaker 1: Over the course of his long life at Maholaholo, he
• 50:53
  Speaker 1: escaped his enclosure multiple times, usually within days of each
• 50:58
  Speaker 1: enclosure upgrade. His keepers described him with what sounds like
• 51:04
  Speaker 1: genuine affection mixed with exasperation. He was, by all accounts,
• 51:12
  Speaker 1: a character. A difficult and demanding character, but a character nonetheless.
• 51:21
  Speaker 1: The honey badger's relationship with humans who work closely with it, researchers, rehabilitators, zookeepers,
• 51:31
  Speaker 1: is often described in terms that suggest genuine individuality. Each
• 51:38
  Speaker 1: animal is different. Some are bolder, some more cautious. Some
• 51:46
  Speaker 1: respond to specific keepers with what appears to be recognition
• 51:50
  Speaker 1: and tolerance. Others are uniformly hostile to all humans equally.
• 51:59
  Speaker 1: The personality of the individual animal seems to matter, which
• 52:03
  Speaker 1: suggests that within the framework of a generally bold and
• 52:07
  Speaker 1: persistent species there is room for individual variation. This matters
• 52:14
  Speaker 1: because it reminds us that we are not simply looking
• 52:17
  Speaker 1: at a category, at honey badginess as an abstraction, but
• 52:22
  Speaker 1: at individual animals, each with its own history, its own experience,
• 52:29
  Speaker 1: its own particular way of being in the world. This
• 52:35
  Speaker 1: is true of every species. Of course, But it is
• 52:41
  Speaker 1: easy to forget, with animals that seem so archetypal, so
• 52:46
  Speaker 1: clearly defined by their most famous traits. The honey badger
• 52:52
  Speaker 1: is not just a symbol of fearlessness. It is also Stoffel,
• 52:58
  Speaker 1: who liked to escape, and the female who carries a
• 53:02
  Speaker 1: single cub through the Kalahari grass, and the young male
• 53:07
  Speaker 1: learning to dig, uncertain The honey badger's fur has a
• 53:16
  Speaker 1: slightly rough, coarse texture, particularly on the back. It is
• 53:23
  Speaker 1: not the soft, dense fur of an otter or a mink.
• 53:29
  Speaker 1: It is practical fur, thick and resistant rather than plush.
• 53:35
  Speaker 1: The underside fur is somewhat finer and darker. The overall
• 53:41
  Speaker 1: impression when you see a honey badger is of an
• 53:44
  Speaker 1: animal that is built for function over elegance. Every feature
• 53:49
  Speaker 1: clearly serves a purpose, and no feature exists merely to
• 53:53
  Speaker 1: be beautiful. And yet, there is a beauty to the
• 53:59
  Speaker 1: honey badger. Not the kind that invites you to stroke it.
• 54:04
  Speaker 1: Not the kind that is conventionally appealing. but a beauty
• 54:09
  Speaker 1: that comes from coherence, from seeing an animal that is
• 54:13
  Speaker 1: completely and perfectly itself, whose every feature is in conversation
• 54:19
  Speaker 1: with every other feature, whose whole is exactly what it
• 54:24
  Speaker 1: was shaped to be. The pale silver-gray of the back
• 54:29
  Speaker 1: catches the light in certain hours of the day, in
• 54:32
  Speaker 1: the early morning, in the gold before sunset. and it
• 54:37
  Speaker 1: can look almost luminous against the dry earth. The contrast
• 54:43
  Speaker 1: with the black below is clean and graphic, like something designed.
• 54:50
  Speaker 1: And perhaps that is the right word for it. Not
• 54:53
  Speaker 1: designed by intention, but shaped by the slow, patient accumulation
• 55:00
  Speaker 1: of selection across millions of generations. The honey badger looks
• 55:06
  Speaker 1: the way it looks, because, over immense stretches of time,
• 55:12
  Speaker 1: the animals that looked this way survived. Let us think
• 55:17
  Speaker 1: about that for a moment. Every feature of the honey badger,
• 55:24
  Speaker 1: the thick skin, the loose hide, the strong claws, the
• 55:30
  Speaker 1: venom resistance, the two-toned coloring, the robust jaw, is a
• 55:37
  Speaker 1: story A story of what worked. What kept animals alive
• 55:44
  Speaker 1: long enough to have young? What kept those young alive
• 55:49
  Speaker 1: long enough to have young of their own? The honey
• 55:53
  Speaker 1: badger's body is a library of solutions, each one written
• 55:58
  Speaker 1: in the language of survival, accumulated over millions of years
• 56:02
  Speaker 1: of testing against the real world. And the world against
• 56:08
  Speaker 1: which those solutions were tested was not gentle. The savannah
• 56:14
  Speaker 1: is a place of genuine difficulty. Heat, drought, competition, predation, scarcity, disease.
• 56:27
  Speaker 1: Every day is a negotiation with the constraints of a
• 56:30
  Speaker 1: body that needs calories, water, rest, and safety. The honey
• 56:39
  Speaker 1: badger navigates all of this, as it has always done,
• 56:44
  Speaker 1: without complaint, without drama, with a persistence that does not
• 56:49
  Speaker 1: seem to require encouragement from outside itself. There are places
• 56:56
  Speaker 1: in the honey badger's range where the landscape itself is
• 57:00
  Speaker 1: ancient in a way that is easy to feel, even
• 57:03
  Speaker 1: if it is harder to articulate. The Kalahari Desert home
• 57:09
  Speaker 1: to some of the best-studied honey badger populations, is not
• 57:14
  Speaker 1: a desert in the conventional sense of bare sand and
• 57:17
  Speaker 1: no life. It is a semi-arid savannah with grasses and
• 57:24
  Speaker 1: scattered trees, dry riverbeds that fill briefly with water after rain,
• 57:30
  Speaker 1: and an ecosystem that supports a remarkable density of wildlife.
• 57:37
  Speaker 1: The Kalahari has been shaped over millions of years by wind,
• 57:41
  Speaker 1: by water, by the slow drift of continental plates. The
• 57:47
  Speaker 1: red sand that gives it its characteristic color has been
• 57:51
  Speaker 1: there for longer than modern humans have been a species.
• 57:56
  Speaker 1: Walking across the Kalahari, or lying still within it, you
• 58:02
  Speaker 1: are resting on something ancient and vast. a surface worn
• 58:07
  Speaker 1: smooth by time, inhabited by creatures shaped by time, in
• 58:12
  Speaker 1: a relationship with the land that time itself has negotiated.
• 58:19
  Speaker 1: Honey badgers living in the Kalahari have been tracked using
• 58:22
  Speaker 1: radio collars and camera traps by various research teams, including
• 58:28
  Speaker 1: long-term studies by groups based in South Africa and Botswana.
• 58:34
  Speaker 1: These studies have given us much of what we know
• 58:37
  Speaker 1: about honey badger home ranges, movement patterns, diet, and social behavior.
• 58:46
  Speaker 1: What they show, again and again, is an animal of
• 58:51
  Speaker 1: extraordinary independence and self-sufficiency. One female honey badger tracked in
• 58:59
  Speaker 1: a study was recorded visiting over 40 different watering points
• 59:04
  Speaker 1: within her range over the course of a dry season
• 59:06
  Speaker 1: 40 different places where water could be found, remembered and
• 59:13
  Speaker 1: navigated to with precision. The mental map required to do this,
• 59:19
  Speaker 1: to hold the spatial layout of a vast territory in
• 59:23
  Speaker 1: your mind, to know where water is and where it
• 59:27
  Speaker 1: is not, to adjust as the season changes, is a
• 59:32
  Speaker 1: genuine cognitive achievement. Water is scarce in many of the
• 59:38
  Speaker 1: habitats the honey badger occupies. The animal has behavioral and
• 59:44
  Speaker 1: physiological adaptations for dealing with this. It can obtain much
• 59:50
  Speaker 1: of its water from its food, from the blood of prey,
• 59:55
  Speaker 1: from the moisture content of roots and fruits it consumes.
• 1:00:00
  Speaker 1: and it conserves energy and water by resting in its
• 1:00:03
  Speaker 1: burrow during the hottest parts of the day. The burrow
• 1:00:08
  Speaker 1: is cool and humid compared to the surface, offering a
• 1:00:12
  Speaker 1: microclimate that the honey badger exploits with calm practicality. Beneath
• 1:00:20
  Speaker 1: the surface, the honey badger's world is partly subterranean. It
• 1:00:27
  Speaker 1: spends significant portions of its life underground, sleeping, resting, giving birth,
• 1:00:36
  Speaker 1: hiding from the worst of the heat. The burrow is
• 1:00:41
  Speaker 1: not a place the honey badger retreats to out of fear.
• 1:00:46
  Speaker 1: It is simply part of its world, a different layer
• 1:00:50
  Speaker 1: of the same territory, darker and cooler and more contained.
• 1:00:57
  Speaker 1: In India, the honey badger, the bijou, inhabits a range
• 1:01:03
  Speaker 1: of habitats including forested areas, scrublands, and the edges of
• 1:01:10
  Speaker 1: agricultural land. Here, its diet overlaps somewhat with that of
• 1:01:17
  Speaker 1: its African counterparts. Snakes, small mammals, birds, but also includes
• 1:01:26
  Speaker 1: specifically Indian prey species. The Indian cobra, one of the
• 1:01:32
  Speaker 1: most recognizable and feared snakes in the world, is within
• 1:01:36
  Speaker 1: the dietary range of the Indian honey badger. The relationship
• 1:01:42
  Speaker 1: between the bijou and the cobra is ancient and ecologically embedded,
• 1:01:48
  Speaker 1: a predator-prey dynamic that has shaped both animals across the millennia.
• 1:01:55
  Speaker 1: It is tempting to think of the honey badger as invincible.
• 1:02:00
  Speaker 1: The accumulated weight of its remarkable qualities, the venom resistance,
• 1:02:07
  Speaker 1: the thick skin, the audacity, can give the impression of
• 1:02:12
  Speaker 1: an animal that is simply beyond harm. But this is
• 1:02:16
  Speaker 1: not true. Young honey badgers are vulnerable. A cub separated
• 1:02:23
  Speaker 1: from its mother is at serious risk from large raptors,
• 1:02:28
  Speaker 1: wild cats, and other predators. Even adult honey badgers can
• 1:02:34
  Speaker 1: be killed by large predators when they are outnumbered, caught
• 1:02:38
  Speaker 1: off guard, or simply overwhelmed. The honey badger is remarkable,
• 1:02:45
  Speaker 1: but it is not magical. The world is not arranged
• 1:02:50
  Speaker 1: in its favor by any greater force. It survives because
• 1:02:55
  Speaker 1: it is well suited to survive. Because it has been
• 1:02:59
  Speaker 1: shaped by evolution into something that fits its environment with
• 1:03:03
  Speaker 1: unusual precision. That is not invincibility. It is something quieter
• 1:03:11
  Speaker 1: and more interesting than that. It is competence. Deep. well-tested,
• 1:03:20
  Speaker 1: embodied competence. The honey badger has been observed eating scorpions.
• 1:03:30
  Speaker 1: In many parts of its range, scorpions are abundant and
• 1:03:35
  Speaker 1: some species carry venom potent enough to seriously harm or
• 1:03:39
  Speaker 1: kill a dog. The honey badger does not appear to
• 1:03:43
  Speaker 1: find them concerning. It flips them over, bites off the tail,
• 1:03:50
  Speaker 1: and eats the body. The degree to which this involves
• 1:03:55
  Speaker 1: any genuine assessment of the risk or is simply confident
• 1:03:59
  Speaker 1: habit developed through experience is not something we can determine
• 1:04:04
  Speaker 1: for certain. But it is a quietly extraordinary thing to observe.
• 1:04:12
  Speaker 1: The honey badger also eats the horned adder, the cape cobra,
• 1:04:17
  Speaker 1: the Mozambique spitting cobra, and the boomslang, a large, tree-dwelling
• 1:04:25
  Speaker 1: snake whose venom causes internal bleeding in its prey. The
• 1:04:31
  Speaker 1: boomslang was for a long time considered relatively harmless to
• 1:04:35
  Speaker 1: humans because it had rear-fanged teeth, meaning it was harder
• 1:04:40
  Speaker 1: for it to deliver a bite. But its venom, when delivered,
• 1:04:46
  Speaker 1: is potently dangerous. The honey badger, as best as we
• 1:04:52
  Speaker 1: can tell, regards the boomslang as a meal. Let us
• 1:04:58
  Speaker 1: take a breath, and let the accumulated weight of all
• 1:05:03
  Speaker 1: of this settle. Here is an animal small enough to
• 1:05:08
  Speaker 1: fit under a coffee table. An animal you could, in
• 1:05:13
  Speaker 1: terms of pure mass, hold in your arms. An animal
• 1:05:19
  Speaker 1: that navigates the world with such quiet, settled confidence that
• 1:05:24
  Speaker 1: it regularly walks away from confrontations with animals 20 or
• 1:05:28
  Speaker 1: 30 times its size. An animal whose evolutionary history stretches
• 1:05:35
  Speaker 1: back to a time before our own species was a species.
• 1:05:40
  Speaker 1: An animal that digs its own shelter, finds its own food,
• 1:05:46
  Speaker 1: navigates vast territories alone, and gets back up after being
• 1:05:51
  Speaker 1: bitten by a mamba. And it does all of this without,
• 1:05:57
  Speaker 1: as far as we can tell, the slightest trace of
• 1:06:01
  Speaker 1: the existential anxiety that seems to be the particular burden
• 1:06:06
  Speaker 1: of the species currently thinking about it. The honey badger
• 1:06:11
  Speaker 1: does not worry about being a honey badger. It simply
• 1:06:17
  Speaker 1: is one. The honey badger's place in popular culture is,
• 1:06:24
  Speaker 1: by now, well established. A YouTube video from 2011, narrated
• 1:06:32
  Speaker 1: in an irreverent style, introduced the honey badger to a
• 1:06:37
  Speaker 1: generation of internet users. The refrain of the video, Honey
• 1:06:43
  Speaker 1: Badger Don't Care, became something of a cultural shorthand for
• 1:06:48
  Speaker 1: a particular kind of fearless indifference. The video has been
• 1:06:53
  Speaker 1: viewed hundreds of millions of times. What is interesting about
• 1:06:58
  Speaker 1: this cultural moment is what it reveals about human psychology.
• 1:07:04
  Speaker 1: The honey badger resonated so strongly because it seemed to
• 1:07:09
  Speaker 1: embody something people wanted. A freedom from the constant negotiation
• 1:07:14
  Speaker 1: with social expectations and the threat of judgment. The honey badger,
• 1:07:21
  Speaker 1: in a way, became a projection screen for a fantasy
• 1:07:25
  Speaker 1: of liberation. Look at this creature, the video seemed to say.
• 1:07:32
  Speaker 1: Look at what is possible when you simply don't care.
• 1:07:37
  Speaker 1: Of course, the honey badger does care. It cares about food, water, shelter, offspring.
• 1:07:49
  Speaker 1: It cares about the things that are genuinely worth caring about.
• 1:07:54
  Speaker 1: It simply does not appear to care about the opinions
• 1:07:57
  Speaker 1: of predators who have decided it would make a nice meal.
• 1:08:01
  Speaker 1: This distinction is important. The honey badger is not nihilistic.
• 1:08:08
  Speaker 1: It is not indifferent to everything. It is focused, in
• 1:08:14
  Speaker 1: a very particular and effective way, on what actually matters.
• 1:08:22
  Speaker 1: The greater honey guide, that small bird we mentioned earlier,
• 1:08:27
  Speaker 1: deserves a slightly longer look in the context of honey
• 1:08:31
  Speaker 1: badger biology. The honey guide's relationship with human honey hunters
• 1:08:36
  Speaker 1: in parts of sub-Saharan Africa is one of the most
• 1:08:39
  Speaker 1: extraordinary interspecies collaborations documented in nature. The bird actively seeks
• 1:08:46
  Speaker 1: out human foragers, uses a specific call to attract their attention,
• 1:08:53
  Speaker 1: and then leads them through the landscape, stop by stop,
• 1:08:58
  Speaker 1: perch by perch. to a bee's nest. After the humans
• 1:09:04
  Speaker 1: break open the nest and take the honey, the bird
• 1:09:08
  Speaker 1: feeds on the exposed wax and larvae. Both parties benefit.
• 1:09:15
  Speaker 1: It is a mutualistic relationship. and it appears to be
• 1:09:19
  Speaker 1: genuinely ancient. Whether the honey guide engages in anything similar
• 1:09:25
  Speaker 1: with honey badgers is, as mentioned, more contested. Some older
• 1:09:33
  Speaker 1: field accounts describe seeing the two together, moving in apparent
• 1:09:38
  Speaker 1: tandem toward a nest. But controlled observations have been difficult
• 1:09:43
  Speaker 1: to establish. and researchers are cautious about over-interpreting anecdotal reports.
• 1:09:52
  Speaker 1: What seems most likely is that the relationship between honey
• 1:09:55
  Speaker 1: guide and honey badger, if it exists as something intentional,
• 1:10:00
  Speaker 1: is more opportunistic and variable than the bird's relationship with
• 1:10:04
  Speaker 1: human honey hunters. The honey badger, after all, is very
• 1:10:12
  Speaker 1: good at finding bees' nests on its own. It does
• 1:10:16
  Speaker 1: not strictly need the guidance. Let us drift, for a moment,
• 1:10:24
  Speaker 1: toward something smaller. Toward the detail of a single night.
• 1:10:32
  Speaker 1: A female honey badger, somewhere in the Kalahari, on a
• 1:10:37
  Speaker 1: night in the dry season, emerges from her burrow just
• 1:10:41
  Speaker 1: after sunset. The air is cooling rapidly from the day's heat.
• 1:10:48
  Speaker 1: The sky above is enormous and star-thick, the way it
• 1:10:53
  Speaker 1: is in places without electric light. She pauses at the
• 1:10:58
  Speaker 1: burrow entrance, sniffs, takes in the data the air is carrying,
• 1:11:06
  Speaker 1: the scent of dry grass, the trace of a zebra
• 1:11:10
  Speaker 1: that passed through hours ago, The faint underground signature of
• 1:11:14
  Speaker 1: a mouse burrow not far to the north. She moves.
• 1:11:21
  Speaker 1: Low to the ground. Unhurried. Following the scent map of
• 1:11:27
  Speaker 1: her territory with the confidence of someone who has walked
• 1:11:30
  Speaker 1: this landscape a thousand times. The red sand is warm
• 1:11:36
  Speaker 1: still from the day's sun. Dry grasses brush against her sides.
• 1:11:43
  Speaker 1: She navigates around a fallen termite mound, pauses at a
• 1:11:48
  Speaker 1: tuft of vegetation, digs briefly, six quick strokes with her
• 1:11:54
  Speaker 1: front claws, and retrieves a beetle larva from just below
• 1:11:58
  Speaker 1: the surface. She eats it without stopping, continuing in the
• 1:12:04
  Speaker 1: same direction. The stars above her are the same stars
• 1:12:10
  Speaker 1: that were above the first honey badgers. the same stars
• 1:12:14
  Speaker 1: that watched the first members of our own lineage walking upright.
• 1:12:20
  Speaker 1: She does not look up at them. She has no
• 1:12:23
  Speaker 1: reason to. She moves through the dark with her nose
• 1:12:28
  Speaker 1: and her memory and her claws, efficient and entire, a
• 1:12:33
  Speaker 1: small moving warmth beneath the vast sky. Somewhere behind her,
• 1:12:42
  Speaker 1: Inside the burrow she has just left, her cub sleeps.
• 1:12:48
  Speaker 1: A small, dark shape, curled and breathing. In a few months,
• 1:12:56
  Speaker 1: the cub will follow her on these night journeys. For now,
• 1:13:03
  Speaker 1: it sleeps. The walls of the burrow hold the scent
• 1:13:07
  Speaker 1: of its mother, and the earth is cool and the
• 1:13:11
  Speaker 1: night outside is something that can wait. The honey badger's
• 1:13:17
  Speaker 1: place in its ecosystem extends beyond what it eats and
• 1:13:22
  Speaker 1: what it digs. As a medium-sized predator, it plays a
• 1:13:28
  Speaker 1: role in controlling populations of rodents, reptiles, and invertebrates. In
• 1:13:36
  Speaker 1: areas where honey badger populations decline, Researchers have noted changes
• 1:13:42
  Speaker 1: in the abundance and distribution of prey species. This is
• 1:13:47
  Speaker 1: the web of ecological relationships. Each thread connected to others,
• 1:13:54
  Speaker 1: each removal causing ripples. The honey badger is one thread.
• 1:14:01
  Speaker 1: But it is a sturdy thread. A thread that has
• 1:14:06
  Speaker 1: been in this web for a very long time. The
• 1:14:10
  Speaker 1: honey badger's vocalizations during a confrontation with a predator are
• 1:14:14
  Speaker 1: worth describing in some detail, because they are part of
• 1:14:19
  Speaker 1: what makes an encounter so memorable. The animal produces a
• 1:14:24
  Speaker 1: sustained rattling growl, deep, buzzing, continuous, that communicates, somehow very effectively,
• 1:14:36
  Speaker 1: that this will not be easy. combined with a display
• 1:14:41
  Speaker 1: that includes erecting the long hairs on its back, which
• 1:14:44
  Speaker 1: makes it look slightly larger, and rotating to face the
• 1:14:48
  Speaker 1: threat wherever it moves, the total package is apparently persuasive
• 1:14:54
  Speaker 1: to most predators. Even if the predator persists, the honey
• 1:15:00
  Speaker 1: badger does not simply absorb punishment. It fights actively. biting
• 1:15:08
  Speaker 1: with precision towards sensitive areas, twisting in its loose skin
• 1:15:12
  Speaker 1: to gain access to whatever is holding it, vocalizing continuously.
• 1:15:19
  Speaker 1: There are accounts of honey badgers biting the testicles of
• 1:15:23
  Speaker 1: attacking lions and buffalo, targeting, apparently intentionally, the most sensitive
• 1:15:31
  Speaker 1: and least armored target available. This level of strategic thinking
• 1:15:38
  Speaker 1: in the midst of a physical confrontation, is another marker
• 1:15:43
  Speaker 1: of the animal's cognitive sophistication. In the wild, animals that
• 1:15:50
  Speaker 1: prey on honey badgers, those that successfully kill them, are
• 1:15:55
  Speaker 1: primarily large cats, leopards, and lions, large raptors, martial eagles,
• 1:16:03
  Speaker 1: Varro's eagle, and, in some regions, Crocodiles. These are all
• 1:16:11
  Speaker 1: animals with either size, speed, or the element of surprise
• 1:16:17
  Speaker 1: strongly in their favor. Even then, a healthy adult honey
• 1:16:23
  Speaker 1: badger is a significant challenge, and many predators, as noted,
• 1:16:30
  Speaker 1: decide the effort is not worth the reward. This is
• 1:16:35
  Speaker 1: one of the reasons the honey badger's bold posturing is
• 1:16:38
  Speaker 1: adaptive rather than foolish. The display works. Not always. Not
• 1:16:47
  Speaker 1: against every predator in every circumstance. But often enough that
• 1:16:53
  Speaker 1: the genes encoding the behavior have persisted and flourished across
• 1:16:57
  Speaker 1: millions of generations. The honey badger's defiance is not a mistake.
• 1:17:04
  Speaker 1: or an eccentricity. It is a strategy, a very old,
• 1:17:11
  Speaker 1: very well-tested strategy. The wild dog of Africa, the painted wolf,
• 1:17:20
  Speaker 1: is one of the few predators that hunts in coordinated
• 1:17:23
  Speaker 1: packs and might, in theory, represent a genuine threat to
• 1:17:29
  Speaker 1: a honey badger. Yet accounts of painted wolves successfully killing
• 1:17:35
  Speaker 1: honey badgers are rare. The coordination required to manage a
• 1:17:40
  Speaker 1: honey badger, to prevent it from getting access to any
• 1:17:44
  Speaker 1: individual dog, seems to exceed what the pack typically manages
• 1:17:49
  Speaker 1: in practice. Wild dogs are intelligent hunters, but the honey
• 1:17:56
  Speaker 1: badger appears to occupy a category that even coordinated intelligence
• 1:18:02
  Speaker 1: struggles with. The honey badger's existence raises interesting philosophical questions
• 1:18:09
  Speaker 1: about the nature of resilience. We tend to think of
• 1:18:13
  Speaker 1: resilience as something that is built up through hardship. That
• 1:18:17
  Speaker 1: you become resilient by overcoming difficulty. And there is truth
• 1:18:23
  Speaker 1: in that. But the honey badger suggests another dimension. Resilience
• 1:18:30
  Speaker 1: has a starting condition. The thick skin, the venom resistance,
• 1:18:37
  Speaker 1: the loose hide. These are not things the honey badger
• 1:18:42
  Speaker 1: developed by overcoming adversity. They are things it was born with,
• 1:18:49
  Speaker 1: inherited from ancestors who survived. The resilience came first. The
• 1:18:56
  Speaker 1: survival followed from it. In our own lives, we tend
• 1:19:02
  Speaker 1: to think of this the other way around. But perhaps
• 1:19:06
  Speaker 1: both are true simultaneously. We are shaped by our difficulties,
• 1:19:13
  Speaker 1: and we are also, partly, shaped before them, by the
• 1:19:19
  Speaker 1: accumulated experience of those who came before us, carried in
• 1:19:24
  Speaker 1: the particular way we are made. The honey badger does
• 1:19:29
  Speaker 1: not reflect on this. It simply carries it forward, night
• 1:19:35
  Speaker 1: after night, through the grass and the dark. There are
• 1:19:41
  Speaker 1: something like 12,000 species of bees in the world, and
• 1:19:46
  Speaker 1: the honey badger has relationships in various parts of its
• 1:19:50
  Speaker 1: range with multiple species of stinging bee. The African honeybee,
• 1:19:59
  Speaker 1: Apis mellifera scutellata, is particularly notorious for its aggressive defense
• 1:20:05
  Speaker 1: of its hives. This is the bee that when introduced
• 1:20:10
  Speaker 1: to South America, hybridized with European honeybees to create what
• 1:20:15
  Speaker 1: the press called the killer bee, an unfortunately dramatic name
• 1:20:20
  Speaker 1: for an animal that is really just doing what bees do,
• 1:20:25
  Speaker 1: but doing it with more enthusiasm. The honey badger engages
• 1:20:31
  Speaker 1: the African honeybee regularly and apparently without trauma. It enters
• 1:20:37
  Speaker 1: a cloud of stinging bees, does its work, and exits.
• 1:20:45
  Speaker 1: Researchers have noted that after raiding a hive, a honey
• 1:20:49
  Speaker 1: badger may briefly show signs of discomfort, rubbing its face, scratching,
• 1:20:56
  Speaker 1: before continuing about its business. It feels the stings. It
• 1:21:03
  Speaker 1: just doesn't stop for them. The evolution of this tolerance
• 1:21:08
  Speaker 1: is itself A quiet story. The earliest honey badger ancestors
• 1:21:14
  Speaker 1: presumably had a lower threshold for bee venom than modern
• 1:21:18
  Speaker 1: honey badgers do. Over millions of generations, individuals with greater
• 1:21:25
  Speaker 1: tolerance survived longer and reproduced more successfully. Gradually, over stretches
• 1:21:33
  Speaker 1: of time that are genuinely difficult to imagine, the tolerance increased.
• 1:21:40
  Speaker 1: the honey badger did not choose to become what it became.
• 1:21:45
  Speaker 1: It was shaped, slowly and without intention, into its current form.
• 1:21:52
  Speaker 1: By time, by pressure, by the inexorable, patient work of
• 1:21:59
  Speaker 1: natural selection. All of us were, in a sense, whatever
• 1:22:07
  Speaker 1: we are, we were shaped by something older than ourselves,
• 1:22:13
  Speaker 1: by the long chain of those who survived before us.
• 1:22:18
  Speaker 1: This is not a comforting thought, exactly. But it is, perhaps,
• 1:22:26
  Speaker 1: a grounding one. The honey badger is listed in Indian
• 1:22:32
  Speaker 1: religion and cultural mythology as though not as prominently as
• 1:22:37
  Speaker 1: larger animals like elephants or tigers. In some regional folklore,
• 1:22:44
  Speaker 1: the bijou is associated with tenacity and with the ability
• 1:22:48
  Speaker 1: to face enemies much larger than oneself. Stories about the
• 1:22:54
  Speaker 1: bijou and the cobra, the classic encounter between the fearless
• 1:22:58
  Speaker 1: digger and the deadly serpent, are told in various forms.
• 1:23:03
  Speaker 1: across different communities within its range. These stories have a
• 1:23:09
  Speaker 1: quality of instruction about them. They teach something, though exactly
• 1:23:15
  Speaker 1: what they teach depends on who is listening and when.
• 1:23:21
  Speaker 1: In parts of Southern Africa, honey badgers have been observed
• 1:23:26
  Speaker 1: behaving in ways that suggest emotional states beyond simple hunger
• 1:23:30
  Speaker 1: and fear. A widowed honey badger, one whose mate was killed,
• 1:23:37
  Speaker 1: has been observed lingering near the site of the death,
• 1:23:41
  Speaker 1: returning multiple times over several days. Whether this constitutes grief
• 1:23:47
  Speaker 1: in any meaningful sense, or is simply the result of
• 1:23:51
  Speaker 1: a disruption to an established routine, is impossible to say
• 1:23:56
  Speaker 1: with certainty. But the behavior is recorded. The animal was there,
• 1:24:05
  Speaker 1: returning to a place of loss. There is no framework
• 1:24:10
  Speaker 1: within which that is not, at least, worth pausing over.
• 1:24:18
  Speaker 1: The honey badger's hearing is acute. The ears are small
• 1:24:23
  Speaker 1: and rounded, set close to the head. Another adaptation to
• 1:24:29
  Speaker 1: the digging lifestyle. reducing the chance of ears being caught
• 1:24:33
  Speaker 1: on rocks or roots in tight spaces. But the ears
• 1:24:39
  Speaker 1: work well. A honey badger can hear the sound of
• 1:24:43
  Speaker 1: a beetle moving through soil, or a mouse turning in
• 1:24:47
  Speaker 1: its underground nest. Its perception of the subsurface world is
• 1:24:53
  Speaker 1: genuinely remarkable. An integration of smell and hearing and memory,
• 1:24:59
  Speaker 1: that allows it to navigate a landscape that is invisible
• 1:25:02
  Speaker 1: to us. There is a layer of the world that
• 1:25:07
  Speaker 1: most of us never perceive, and the honey badger lives
• 1:25:11
  Speaker 1: in it. The layer just below the surface, the dark, cool,
• 1:25:19
  Speaker 1: root-threaded world beneath the soil. The honey badger has access
• 1:25:25
  Speaker 1: to both layers simultaneously. the bright open surface and the
• 1:25:30
  Speaker 1: hidden world below. It moves between them, through the gap
• 1:25:36
  Speaker 1: at the burrow entrance, with an ease that makes both
• 1:25:40
  Speaker 1: seem equally natural. The roots of the trees above a
• 1:25:45
  Speaker 1: honey badger's burrow may be older than many human buildings.
• 1:25:51
  Speaker 1: The baobab trees of Africa can live for several thousand years.
• 1:25:57
  Speaker 1: The roots of a baobab spreading beneath the Kalahari sand,
• 1:26:01
  Speaker 1: threading through the soil above a sleeping honey badger, may
• 1:26:05
  Speaker 1: have been growing since before the great cathedrals of Europe
• 1:26:08
  Speaker 1: were built. The honey badger does not know this. And yet,
• 1:26:15
  Speaker 1: it is part of the same ancient, rooted world. It
• 1:26:23
  Speaker 1: is night, wherever you are. Or almost night. Or the
• 1:26:29
  Speaker 1: hours just before sleep. And the world outside your window
• 1:26:34
  Speaker 1: is full of things that are exactly what they are.
• 1:26:38
  Speaker 1: Persisting in their own existence. Unconcerned with how they appear
• 1:26:43
  Speaker 1: to others. Simply living. A spider constructing a web. An
• 1:26:51
  Speaker 1: earthworm moving through the dark soil. A moth... Navigating by starlight.
• 1:26:59
  Speaker 1: All of them doing what they do. Because it is
• 1:27:03
  Speaker 1: what there is to do. The honey badger, somewhere in
• 1:27:09
  Speaker 1: the Kalahari right now, is probably walking. Somewhere in India,
• 1:27:16
  Speaker 1: one is probably sleeping in a burrow. Somewhere in Iran
• 1:27:21
  Speaker 1: or Morocco or Zambia, a honey badger is digging. or eating,
• 1:27:28
  Speaker 1: or lying in the dark, breathing slowly. The world is
• 1:27:33
  Speaker 1: full of them, these small and ancient and remarkable animals,
• 1:27:39
  Speaker 1: doing exactly what they have always done. The honey badger's
• 1:27:45
  Speaker 1: capacity for what we might loosely call stubbornness is, from
• 1:27:50
  Speaker 1: an ecological perspective, an essential trait. Finding food in a
• 1:27:56
  Speaker 1: semi-arid environment requires not just skill, but persistence. A promising
• 1:28:03
  Speaker 1: scent may lead to a burrow that yields nothing. A
• 1:28:08
  Speaker 1: digging effort may hit rock. A chase may end without
• 1:28:13
  Speaker 1: a catch. The honey badger simply moves on and tries again.
• 1:28:20
  Speaker 1: The emotional relationship it has with failure, to the extent
• 1:28:24
  Speaker 1: that it has one, appears to be brief and practical. Try. Fail.
• 1:28:33
  Speaker 1: Try again. Try differently. Keep going. There is a research
• 1:28:41
  Speaker 1: study that placed various problem-solving challenges in front of captive
• 1:28:46
  Speaker 1: honey badgers. Boxes with food inside. Latched containers. Multi-step puzzles.
• 1:28:56
  Speaker 1: The honey badgers were persistent and adaptable. using a combination
• 1:29:01
  Speaker 1: of brute force and exploratory behavior to work through the challenges.
• 1:29:08
  Speaker 1: They rarely gave up before exhausting all available strategies. And
• 1:29:14
  Speaker 1: when returned to a problem they had solved before, they
• 1:29:18
  Speaker 1: solved it significantly faster the second time. They remembered. They learned.
• 1:29:27
  Speaker 1: They carried the experience forward, This learning across time, this
• 1:29:34
  Speaker 1: ability to hold a memory of how something works and
• 1:29:38
  Speaker 1: apply it again later, is one of the foundations of
• 1:29:42
  Speaker 1: intelligence as we understand it. It is what allows an
• 1:29:47
  Speaker 1: animal to do more than simply respond to the present.
• 1:29:51
  Speaker 1: It allows it to be shaped by the past in
• 1:29:55
  Speaker 1: ways that serve the future. The honey badger does this
• 1:30:00
  Speaker 1: quietly and consistently. It is, in its understated way, a learner.
• 1:30:10
  Speaker 1: The way honey badgers move in relation to each other,
• 1:30:14
  Speaker 1: those brief, rare encounters between solitary individuals, is also worth considering.
• 1:30:23
  Speaker 1: Male honey badgers encountering each other's scent markings in overlapping
• 1:30:27
  Speaker 1: home ranges do not typically seek confrontation. They navigate around
• 1:30:33
  Speaker 1: each other through scent signals, communicating territory and status without
• 1:30:39
  Speaker 1: needing to meet directly. This kind of long-distance social communication,
• 1:30:46
  Speaker 1: a conversation conducted through smell across space and time, is
• 1:30:51
  Speaker 1: efficient and low-risk. The animals know of each other without
• 1:30:57
  Speaker 1: needing to be in the same place. There is something
• 1:31:01
  Speaker 1: almost elegant about that. When male and female honey badgers
• 1:31:07
  Speaker 1: do meet, for mating, the interaction is typically brief. The
• 1:31:14
  Speaker 1: male may follow a female for a period before she
• 1:31:17
  Speaker 1: accepts his presence. The interaction is governed by scent, by behavior,
• 1:31:25
  Speaker 1: by the quiet negotiation of two independent animals finding a
• 1:31:29
  Speaker 1: temporary alignment. After mating, they part. The male's involvement in
• 1:31:38
  Speaker 1: the raising of cubs is essentially non-existent in wild populations.
• 1:31:45
  Speaker 1: The mother alone carries forward the next generation. She is,
• 1:31:51
  Speaker 1: in this as in everything else, self-sufficient. The honey badger's
• 1:31:59
  Speaker 1: sense of time is, presumably, very different from our own.
• 1:32:06
  Speaker 1: It does not plan across weeks or months in the
• 1:32:09
  Speaker 1: way that we might. Its temporal horizon is probably one
• 1:32:14
  Speaker 1: of immediate needs and recently acquired information. Where the water
• 1:32:19
  Speaker 1: was last night, where the rodent's scent is strongest this morning,
• 1:32:25
  Speaker 1: what is happening right now? And yet, the evidence of
• 1:32:30
  Speaker 1: its memory and problem-solving suggests that some form of past
• 1:32:35
  Speaker 1: and future do exist in its world. The past that
• 1:32:41
  Speaker 1: shaped its strategies. The expected future toward which its behavior aims.
• 1:32:49
  Speaker 1: In this way, it shares with us something we tend
• 1:32:52
  Speaker 1: to think of as distinctly human. The ability to be
• 1:32:57
  Speaker 1: somewhere in time, that is not just now. As you
• 1:33:04
  Speaker 1: lie here, wherever you are, your breathing already slowing, your
• 1:33:11
  Speaker 1: body already letting go of the day, consider for a
• 1:33:15
  Speaker 1: moment the ancient quality of rest. Every animal rests. Every
• 1:33:22
  Speaker 1: creature that has ever lived on this earth has had
• 1:33:25
  Speaker 1: moments of stillness, of recuperation, of the body doing its
• 1:33:31
  Speaker 1: quiet work without the distraction of movement. The honey badger,
• 1:33:38
  Speaker 1: curled in its burrow in the cool of the earth,
• 1:33:42
  Speaker 1: is doing the same thing you are doing now. Resting. Recovering. Preparing,
• 1:33:52
  Speaker 1: without knowing it, for whatever comes next. Sleep in the
• 1:33:58
  Speaker 1: animal kingdom is a vast and underexplored subject, but honey
• 1:34:03
  Speaker 1: badgers are known to sleep deeply and for significant portions
• 1:34:08
  Speaker 1: of the day. In their cool burrows, they enter prolonged
• 1:34:13
  Speaker 1: periods of rest that allow the body to process the
• 1:34:17
  Speaker 1: physical demands of their active lives. The digging, the fighting,
• 1:34:23
  Speaker 1: the sustained travel across their huge home ranges, All of
• 1:34:28
  Speaker 1: this requires significant recovery. Sleep is not a passive state
• 1:34:35
  Speaker 1: for the honey badger any more than it is for you.
• 1:34:39
  Speaker 1: It is an active restoration. A maintenance of the whole.
• 1:34:46
  Speaker 1: The burrow in which a honey badger sleeps may be
• 1:34:49
  Speaker 1: one it dug itself, or one excavated by an aardvark
• 1:34:54
  Speaker 1: and then taken over. Honey badgers are not possessive about
• 1:34:59
  Speaker 1: burrows the way some territorial animals are. If a better
• 1:35:04
  Speaker 1: burrow presents itself, they use it. If they need a
• 1:35:10
  Speaker 1: burrow quickly, they make one. There is a practical wisdom
• 1:35:16
  Speaker 1: in this. An attachment to function over form, to what
• 1:35:21
  Speaker 1: serves rather than what is merely familiar. We have spoken
• 1:35:27
  Speaker 1: about the honey badger's skin and its claws and its
• 1:35:31
  Speaker 1: venom resistance and its intelligence. But there is one more
• 1:35:36
  Speaker 1: quality that perhaps best summarizes everything we have explored tonight.
• 1:35:43
  Speaker 1: And that is continuity. The honey badger has been here
• 1:35:48
  Speaker 1: for a very long time. It was here before we were.
• 1:35:55
  Speaker 1: It will Barring catastrophe, be here after us. It has
• 1:36:02
  Speaker 1: outlasted ice ages and forest fires, the extinction of massive megafauna,
• 1:36:09
  Speaker 1: the rise of new species and the fall of old ones.
• 1:36:15
  Speaker 1: It has continued, unchanged in its essential nature, through the
• 1:36:20
  Speaker 1: full arc of the last several million years. not because
• 1:36:26
  Speaker 1: it was the biggest or the fastest or the most complex,
• 1:36:31
  Speaker 1: but because it was exactly, precisely, sufficiently itself. The honey
• 1:36:41
  Speaker 1: badger's teeth are replaced as they grow, as in most mammals,
• 1:36:46
  Speaker 1: from milk teeth in the cub stage to permanent adult teeth.
• 1:36:51
  Speaker 1: The adult teeth are robust and deeply rooted, capable of
• 1:36:56
  Speaker 1: sustaining the physical demands of a diet that includes tortoise shells,
• 1:37:01
  Speaker 1: hardened insect casings, and dense bone. The dental formula of
• 1:37:08
  Speaker 1: the honey badger reflects its generalist diet. Incisors for nipping,
• 1:37:14
  Speaker 1: canines for gripping, molars for crushing. Everything in balance. Everything
• 1:37:23
  Speaker 1: suited to the life being lived. In the Guinness World
• 1:37:28
  Speaker 1: Records entry that designates it the world's most fearless animal,
• 1:37:33
  Speaker 1: the honey badger is described as attacking animals much larger
• 1:37:37
  Speaker 1: than itself, including horses and buffalo, when it feels threatened
• 1:37:43
  Speaker 1: or cornered. Buffalo. These are animals that weigh 700 kilograms
• 1:37:51
  Speaker 1: or more. Animals that can kill a lion with a
• 1:37:55
  Speaker 1: single blow. And the honey badger, if pressed, will charge one.
• 1:38:03
  Speaker 1: Not because it expects to win, but because the alternative,
• 1:38:09
  Speaker 1: to retreat, to submit, appears to not occur to it
• 1:38:14
  Speaker 1: as a valid option. This is, of course, not always
• 1:38:22
  Speaker 1: optimal strategy. There are circumstances in which retreat would be
• 1:38:27
  Speaker 1: the wiser choice. Evolution, in this case, seems to have
• 1:38:34
  Speaker 1: arrived at a heuristic rather than a perfect rule. When
• 1:38:39
  Speaker 1: in doubt, hold your ground. And for an animal built
• 1:38:44
  Speaker 1: the way the honey badger is built... With the biological
• 1:38:48
  Speaker 1: defenses it carries, this heuristic has proven successful enough over
• 1:38:54
  Speaker 1: millions of years to justify its continuation. In wildlife rehabilitation settings,
• 1:39:04
  Speaker 1: honey badgers that arrive injured, hit by vehicles, caught in snares,
• 1:39:11
  Speaker 1: mauled by domestic dogs, are among the most challenging patients
• 1:39:18
  Speaker 1: Not because their injuries are always the most severe, but
• 1:39:23
  Speaker 1: because their response to the stress of captivity, to confinement
• 1:39:28
  Speaker 1: and handling, is intense and sustained. Rehabilitators describe them as
• 1:39:36
  Speaker 1: patients that do not stop fighting the situation they're in.
• 1:39:40
  Speaker 1: That do not resign themselves to their enclosure. that treat
• 1:39:46
  Speaker 1: every day as an opportunity to try something different. In
• 1:39:51
  Speaker 1: a rehabilitation context, this makes them difficult to manage. In
• 1:39:58
  Speaker 1: an evolutionary context, it is precisely what has kept the
• 1:40:03
  Speaker 1: species alive. The goal of wildlife rehabilitation, when it succeeds,
• 1:40:12
  Speaker 1: is release. a honey badger returned to its natural range,
• 1:40:19
  Speaker 1: carrying some memory of the injury and the recovery, of
• 1:40:23
  Speaker 1: the strange period in the hands of a different species,
• 1:40:27
  Speaker 1: and moving forward anyway. Finding a burrow. Finding food. Picking
• 1:40:35
  Speaker 1: up the thread of its territory again. The continuity reasserting itself, quietly,
• 1:40:44
  Speaker 1: without drama, The moon rises over the Kalahari. Somewhere in
• 1:40:52
  Speaker 1: that pale, enormous landscape, a honey badger is moving. You
• 1:40:59
  Speaker 1: cannot see it from here, but it is there, as
• 1:41:05
  Speaker 1: it has always been, moving through the dark without apology,
• 1:41:11
  Speaker 1: without hesitation, following its own ancient and reliable instincts, through
• 1:41:18
  Speaker 1: a world that is vast and indifferent and full of
• 1:41:21
  Speaker 1: dangerous things. And somehow, that fact, the simple fact of
• 1:41:29
  Speaker 1: its continued existence, its persistence, its untroubled confidence in its
• 1:41:36
  Speaker 1: own right to be here, is one of the most
• 1:41:39
  Speaker 1: quietly comforting things in the world. The honey badger is related, distantly,
• 1:41:51
  Speaker 1: Both animals occupy a similar ecological niche in their respective
• 1:41:55
  Speaker 1: parts of the world. Medium-sized predators with fearsome reputations and
• 1:42:01
  Speaker 1: a capacity for confronting animals much larger than themselves. The
• 1:42:07
  Speaker 1: wolverine roams the boreal forests and arctic tundra of North
• 1:42:11
  Speaker 1: America and Eurasia. the honey badger roams the savannas and
• 1:42:16
  Speaker 1: deserts of Africa and Asia. They will never meet, but
• 1:42:23
  Speaker 1: they are cousins, in a way, shaped by similar pressures
• 1:42:28
  Speaker 1: into similar solutions, on opposite sides of the world. Evolution
• 1:42:36
  Speaker 1: tends to do this, arrive at similar solutions independently, across
• 1:42:42
  Speaker 1: different lineages, in different places. The convergence of form and
• 1:42:48
  Speaker 1: behavior across unrelated species tells us something important, that the
• 1:42:54
  Speaker 1: pressures of the natural world are not infinitely variable. There
• 1:43:00
  Speaker 1: are niches, and they have shapes. And the animals that
• 1:43:05
  Speaker 1: fill those niches across time and geography end up looking
• 1:43:11
  Speaker 1: and acting somewhat alike. not because they share a recent ancestor,
• 1:43:17
  Speaker 1: but because the niche itself imposes requirements. The honey badger
• 1:43:24
  Speaker 1: and the wolverine both answer the question, what kind of
• 1:43:28
  Speaker 1: animal can carve out a living in a competitive landscape
• 1:43:32
  Speaker 1: by sheer physical and behavioral intensity? The answer turns out
• 1:43:38
  Speaker 1: to be roughly similar in both cases. Low, wide, Strong, tenacious, armored-skinned,
• 1:43:50
  Speaker 1: and not particularly concerned with the approval of others. The
• 1:43:55
  Speaker 1: honey badger's Latin family name, Mustelidae, comes from the Latin mustelus,
• 1:44:03
  Speaker 1: meaning weasel. The weasel family is one of the most
• 1:44:08
  Speaker 1: successful mammal families on Earth. Found on every continent, except
• 1:44:13
  Speaker 1: Australia and Antarctica. The honey badger is among its most
• 1:44:19
  Speaker 1: extreme members in terms of boldness, venom resistance, and the
• 1:44:25
  Speaker 1: size of creatures it is willing to confront. But it
• 1:44:30
  Speaker 1: carries within it the deep family resemblance, the long body,
• 1:44:36
  Speaker 1: the short legs, the pointed face, the powerful claws, the
• 1:44:42
  Speaker 1: scent glands. If you were to look at a honey
• 1:44:46
  Speaker 1: badger and then at a European polecat, a much smaller mustelid,
• 1:44:53
  Speaker 1: dark and sinuous, you would see the family resemblance, the
• 1:44:59
  Speaker 1: shared blueprint, expressed differently by each species according to its
• 1:45:05
  Speaker 1: own particular evolutionary history. Life does this too, takes a
• 1:45:12
  Speaker 1: basic form and elaborates it, modifies it, stretches and compresses it,
• 1:45:20
  Speaker 1: according to the pressures it encounters. The honey badger is
• 1:45:25
  Speaker 1: one elaboration, one answer to the question of how a
• 1:45:30
  Speaker 1: weasel-shaped body might be adapted to the African savannah. The
• 1:45:36
  Speaker 1: answer is thicker skin, more claws, More confidence. Less fear.
• 1:45:47
  Speaker 1: The honey badger's relationship to water is worth a final
• 1:45:50
  Speaker 1: consideration before we drift further toward quiet. In the dry season,
• 1:45:58
  Speaker 1: when rivers shrink to trickles and waterholes become contested resources,
• 1:46:03
  Speaker 1: the honey badger navigates the scarcity with its typical composure.
• 1:46:09
  Speaker 1: It has been observed drinking from the condensation on cool
• 1:46:12
  Speaker 1: rocks in the early morning. It licks moisture from leaves.
• 1:46:19
  Speaker 1: It eats succulent plants, not usually part of its diet.
• 1:46:25
  Speaker 1: It adapts. As it always has. As it always will.
• 1:46:33
  Speaker 1: Water is life. And the honey badger knows where life
• 1:46:37
  Speaker 1: hides in the landscape. not abstractly, not conceptually, but concretely
• 1:46:47
  Speaker 1: and precisely. This rock, this root, this dry riverbed that
• 1:46:54
  Speaker 1: holds moisture three centimeters below the surface. The knowledge of
• 1:47:00
  Speaker 1: its own territory is the honey badger's most important possession.
• 1:47:06
  Speaker 1: And like all genuinely important things, It is invisible, internal,
• 1:47:14
  Speaker 1: carried quietly inside. There are more stars visible tonight than
• 1:47:21
  Speaker 1: in most other conditions in the universe. The night sky
• 1:47:26
  Speaker 1: over the Kalahari is among the clearest on Earth. Dry air,
• 1:47:31
  Speaker 1: no light pollution, the full sweep of the Milky Way
• 1:47:35
  Speaker 1: visible as a band of soft, dense light across the dark.
• 1:47:42
  Speaker 1: The honey badger, moving beneath it, does not look up.
• 1:47:47
  Speaker 1: It has no reason to. The stars are beautiful, but
• 1:47:51
  Speaker 1: they offer nothing useful. No scent, no sound, no food.
• 1:47:59
  Speaker 1: The honey badger keeps its nose to the ground, reading
• 1:48:03
  Speaker 1: the earth, following the thread of what it knows. Ninety
• 1:48:10
  Speaker 1: Facts roughly, have drifted past you tonight. Facts about a
• 1:48:17
  Speaker 1: small and ancient animal that has made the world its
• 1:48:20
  Speaker 1: own through intelligence and tenacity and a startling indifference to
• 1:48:24
  Speaker 1: the opinions of predators. And now, ten more, softly. The
• 1:48:34
  Speaker 1: honey badger is sometimes called a retell in South African English.
• 1:48:40
  Speaker 1: a name derived from old Afrikaans. The honey badger's front
• 1:48:45
  Speaker 1: claws are thicker than its back claws, reflecting the primary
• 1:48:50
  Speaker 1: role of the forelimbs in digging. Honey badgers in captivity
• 1:48:55
  Speaker 1: have been observed playing, manipulating objects for what appears to
• 1:48:59
  Speaker 1: be no other purpose than engagement with the object itself.
• 1:49:05
  Speaker 1: The honey badger has been documented travelling the same routes
• 1:49:08
  Speaker 1: through its territories, with a consistency that suggests deliberate patrolling
• 1:49:13
  Speaker 1: rather than random exploration. Its skull is particularly resistant to compression,
• 1:49:20
  Speaker 1: which may provide protection when it is bitten across the
• 1:49:23
  Speaker 1: head by large predators. Honey badgers will eat carrion, including
• 1:49:30
  Speaker 1: very decomposed flesh that most other mammals would avoid, another
• 1:49:35
  Speaker 1: marker of their robust digestive system. The animal has a
• 1:49:40
  Speaker 1: reputation in South African farming communities for targeting beehives with
• 1:49:45
  Speaker 1: a methodical precision, returning to the same hives repeatedly over
• 1:49:50
  Speaker 1: many months. Research suggests that honey badgers may be capable
• 1:49:56
  Speaker 1: of recognizing individual humans by face and scent, distinguishing between
• 1:50:02
  Speaker 1: people who have been kind to them and those who
• 1:50:05
  Speaker 1: have not. the honey badger's home range tends to be
• 1:50:10
  Speaker 1: larger in drier, less productive environments, where it must cover
• 1:50:15
  Speaker 1: more ground to find adequate food. And finally, the honey badger,
• 1:50:23
  Speaker 1: despite everything, despite all its formidable qualities, despite its global
• 1:50:30
  Speaker 1: reputation and its Guinness World Record and its millions of
• 1:50:34
  Speaker 1: years of successful living, is an animal that, like all animals,
• 1:50:41
  Speaker 1: simply wants enough food, enough water, enough rest, and enough
• 1:50:48
  Speaker 1: space to live. It wants what all of us want,
• 1:50:55
  Speaker 1: in whatever form that takes, in whatever landscape. And now
• 1:51:02
  Speaker 1: the day has ended, or the night has deepened, And
• 1:51:07
  Speaker 1: whatever it was that you carried into this hour, the thoughts,
• 1:51:12
  Speaker 1: the worries, the restless inner noise of being alive in
• 1:51:16
  Speaker 1: the world, has softened a little, perhaps. You have spent
• 1:51:23
  Speaker 1: this time with one of the Earth's most quietly remarkable creatures,
• 1:51:28
  Speaker 1: and perhaps something of its settled, unbothered quality has passed
• 1:51:34
  Speaker 1: into you Just slightly. The way warmth passes through a
• 1:51:39
  Speaker 1: thin wall. The honey badger is out there tonight. Moving
• 1:51:47
  Speaker 1: through its ancient landscape. Unhurried. Unworried. Exactly what it is.
• 1:51:58
  Speaker 1: You don't need to be anything different from what you
• 1:52:00
  Speaker 1: are either. Let your body settle into the surface beneath you.
• 1:52:07
  Speaker 1: Let your breathing slow. Let the thoughts come and go
• 1:52:12
  Speaker 1: the way clouds move across the Kalahari sky. Slowly, without urgency,
• 1:52:20
  Speaker 1: not requiring you to hold onto them. The earth beneath
• 1:52:25
  Speaker 1: the honey badger's paws is old and cool and solid.
• 1:52:30
  Speaker 1: The earth beneath you is the same earth. The same patience.
• 1:52:38
  Speaker 1: The same quiet holding. Close your eyes, if you haven't already.
• 1:52:47
  Speaker 1: Feel the weight of your own body, its warmth, its stillness.
• 1:52:54
  Speaker 1: You have been awake a long time, perhaps, and the
• 1:52:59
  Speaker 1: body knows what it needs. Somewhere, far away and long ago,
• 1:53:07
  Speaker 1: and right now simultaneously, a small honey-silver animal moves through
• 1:53:13
  Speaker 1: the dark. Certain. Calm. Complete. And all the ancient world
• 1:53:23
  Speaker 1: rests around it, breathing slowly, the way you are breathing now. Slowly. Slowly. Still.