Badger Friendly

What on earth is a Honey Badger?

There was a Top Gear Episode (British TV show about cars) shot in Botswana a few years ago where they drove across the Makgadikadi Pans and Okavango Delta. When talking about Botswana, one guy brings up Honey Badgers. His other two friends swear that he’s joking, that there’s no such thing as a honey badger and that he just made it up.

Just the other day, a similar thing happened to me, where I was casually telling a friend about Honey Badgers and their prevalence in Botswana. He swore that I made it up and that I was totally playing a joke. I looked it up on Wikipedia, and nowhere in the article does it mention honey, badgers eating honey, badgers getting anywhere close to honey. But apparently, honey badgers are similar to mongoose in being the type of predators that hunt and eat snakes, rodents and chickens. So why is it called the Honey Badger?

The clue to the answer came in such an innocuous way. In a similar situation as above, I was eating French toast with the same fellow friend who swore I invented the Honey Badger. Instead of syrup, we use honey on top of our French toast. As I drizzled the honey over my toast, I noticed a symbol on the honey bottle that said, “Badger Friendly.” What on earth? Just like Canned Tuna being Dolphin Free, my honey was Badger Friendly, certified by the World Wildlife Fund. Incredible. There MUST be such thing as a Honey Badger for honey to be declared Badger Friendly.

Eager to learn more, I enquired with friends in the office, Why is a Honey Badger called a Honey Badger? Why isn’t it just a Badger? Everyone said of course, it loves to eat honey! But thanks to a ridiculous video on youtube, the honey badger apparently doesn’t eat honey, but instead the larvae of the bees that make honey. Thanks YouTube for helping me find the answers of all of Africa’s unknown.